Jean-Michel Basquiat

Acquired by the present owner directly from the artist

Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris, 1996, 2nd Ed., Vol. II, no. 1, p. 108, illustrated in color
Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris, 2000, 3rd Ed., Vol II, no. 1, p. 174, illustrated in color

This work is in very good condition overall. The colors are bright, fresh and clean. There is evidence of light wear and handling along the edges including a minor separation of the canvas at the lower left corner pull margin. The collaged paper undulates slightly and there are scattered pinpoint media accretions throughout, all inherent to the artist’s working method and intent. There are two small losses to the painted paper in the upper left corner. Under Ultraviolet light inspection, there is no evidence of restoration. Unframed.
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Executed in 1983, the year Basquiat truly cemented his international reputation, this work is a testament to the accomplished and ambitious pictorial intelligence of an artist at the meteoric apex of his career. The works produced in late 1982 and throughout the following year demonstrate an increasingly sophisticated lexicon of raw visual imagery in direct opposition with the intellectualized minimalism that was at the forefront of artistic conversation at the time.

Possessing a palette of cool blues and black, Basquiat at once combines abstract painterly gesture with the chromatic coda of Modernism. Similar to many of Basquiat’s most intriguing paintings, the present lot is mediated by multifaceted references. In what could be considered a more minimal yet vibrantly colored canvas, the portrait of a face and two crude outlines of fish are enshrouded in swathes of brilliant blue and slate gray. The raw spontaneity evident in this painting retains much of the immediacy of his drafted expressionistic outpourings, making for a lively and truly affecting canvas.

Although it is unclear who the human face in the painting belongs to, Basquiat had a history of incorporating black protagonists into his work. Conscious of his identity as one of the most successful black artists within the white-dominated history of art, Basquiat introduced images of black protagonists, who are often adorned with a semi-religious aura and a sense of superiority. Identifying with the personal struggles and inner demons of his pantheon of heroes, Basquiat conferred respect and admiration to his repertoire of black subjects that included Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Hank Aaron, Mohammed Ali, and Sugar Ray Robinson. As such, his loosely articulated, graffiti inspired drawings became a vehicle for melding autobiography with reference to popular culture and black history. In 1983 Basquiat was coming off his solo exhibitions at Annina Nosei in New York, Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles and Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich. Suddenly equipped with the stardom and acclaim he had always sought, Basquiat became the anointed king of the art world; his paintings came to possess a certain visionary relevance. Recalling Modernism’s influence of African art, Basquiat often paints the image of the noble savage for which the artist was widely regarded by his contemporaries. Particularly evident in his 'primitive' depiction of the figure is the essential reinvestment of African art with the identity it had lost to Modernism’s pursuit of formalist reduction, especially at the hands of Pablo Picasso. The scratched and scrawled vocabulary of the present work consciously extends the work of both Jean Dubuffet and Cy Twombly – though distilled and captured through the language of graffiti.

Like a breath of fresh air, Basquiat’s art broke rank with, and usurped, an established canon, subsequently expanding the boundaries of art and bringing to bear a radically new and challenging aesthetic that is still resonant today. From late 1982 to the end of 1983, Basquiat created some of the most self-assured works of his entire career, and this painting, no doubt, counts as one of them.