Jean-Michel Basquiat

Galerie Boulakia, Paris
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Paris, Galerie Boulakia, Basquiat, September 1990, p. 71, illustrated in color
Paris, Musée Galerie de la Seita, Jean-Michel Basquiat, December 1993 - January 1994, cat. no. 40, p. 66
Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Jean-Michel Basquiat, October 2010 - January 2011

This work is in very good condition overall. There are scattered surface abrasions and media accretions on the sheet, which appear to be from the artist's studio and inherent to the artist's working method. The charcoal smudges and finger prints are presumably by the hand of the artist and original to the work's condition. The sheet is hinged verso to the matte along the four edges. Framed under Plexiglas.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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A work of immense significance within Jean-Michael Basquiat’s oeuvre, René Ricard, was created in 1984, a year in which the young artist reached astounding new heights of creative eloquence and expressive power. A portrait of the poet and critic René Ricard, the work combines some of Basquiat’s most vital artistic concerns with a movingly intimate depiction of a figure who played a crucial role in ensuring that the unprecedented genius of this enfant-terrible of the New York graffiti art scene was appreciated on an international level through key articles and writings, in particular with the publication of The Radiant Child in 1981. In the present work, Ricard sits perched at the edge of a bright yellow chair, the formality of the pose counteracted by the choice of jeans and sneakers as apparel, whilst the delicacy of the charcoal shading and striking use of color reveal the artist’s astounding technical ability. Basquiat employs multiple perspectives to allow the onlooker to view Ricard from several opposing angles: the face is seen in clear profile as well as from the front, and the poet is depicted with four hands, one of which nonchalantly holds a lit cigarette. Indeed, Basquiat focusses in particular detail on the hands of the sitter, as though in acknowledgement of their power to wield a pen, imbuing Ricard with elegantly tapering fingers and expansive gestures. A powerful vertical sweep of blue oilstick emerging from Ricard’s middle hand appears to approximate the appearance of a sword, arguably inviting associations with one of the artist’s most important recurring tropes: that of the warrior as signifier of self-portrait. Basquiat’s pride in the work was clearly displayed when he chose to include a xerox of this drawing in two seminal paintings, Glenn (1984) and Quij (1985), in which a small segment of René Ricard is clearly visible.

Magnificently conceived and brilliantly executed, René Ricard masterfully captures the intriguing character of its sitter. Born in 1946 in Boston, Ricard had made a name for himself as a successful poet by the late 1970s, and had appeared in two of Andy Warhol’s films – Kitchen and The Andy Warhol Story - when he decided to move into art criticism. His aim was an ambitious one: to discover and publicise artists he considered to be unappreciated within the New York scene, as he recalled: “At the end of the seventies, the art world was moribund and I set out to revitalise it… Not only would I help to create the eighties socially, I could give it a literature, a style” (cited in Phoebe Hoban, Basquiat, A Quick Killing in Art, New York, 1998, p. 93). Captivated by one of Basquiat’s paintings on first sight, Ricard published a major article within Artforum in December 1981 which discussed the vibrancy of graffiti art – making frequent reference to SAMO, Basquiat’s original street-art moniker – and celebrated the beginnings of Basquiat’s artistic journey from graffiti painter to gallery artist. Ricard wrote of the twenty-one year old Basquiat: “He has a perfect idea of what he is getting across, using everything that collates his vision… If Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet had a baby and gave it up for adoption, it would be Jean-Michel. The elegance of Twombly is there…and so is the brut of the young Dubuffet” (cited in Ibid., p. 89). Following the publication of the article, Ricard was to go on to develop a friendship with the artist over the next few years, witnessing Basquiat’s incredibly rapid rise to international prominence and the accompanying issues provoked by the need to acclimate swiftly to hitherto unimaginable wealth.

There is an element of mischief inherent with Basquiat’s depiction of Ricard: three heads are illustrated aside from the main body of the sitter, one of which features a forked tongue alongside somewhat serpentine eyes. The middle head, shown in profile, is almost skeletal in appearance, inviting comparisons with the African tribal masks and shamanistic heads that fascinated Basquiat, appearing frequently within many of his most significant works. Marc Mayer analyses the effect of these mysterious, often disquieting, illustrations: “There are his emaciated, scarified, and almost extra-terrestrial griots – a term for West African bards. Chilling fetishes, they exploit an American fantasy of an unrecorded un-Africa of fear and sorcery” (Marc Mayer in ‘Basquiat in History’ in: Exh. Cat., New York, Brooklyn Museum, Basquiat,  2005, p. 45). The figure of Ricard is thus imbued with a sense of the dreamlike and the fantastical, elevating the portrait into a more complex realm of interpretation and understanding. The words and sentences written to the left of and below Ricard’s feet, along with the phrase ‘False Teeth’ appear to defy a rational reading, although the circled words of ‘And Pays Well’ can perhaps be viewed as a wry allusion on the part of the artist to his change of circumstances between 1981 and 1984. Ultimately René Ricard is a work of extraordinary brilliance that truly encapsulates Basquiat’s astonishingly precocious talent and skill at this crucial moment within his artistic development.