Jean-Michel Basquiat

Mary Boone Gallery, New York

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1985

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is cooler and darker in the original. The catalogue illustration also fails to convey a silkscreen painting underneath the white paint. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Extremely close inspection reveal some minor wear and associated losses to the bottom left and top right corners and one minute loss to the upper centre of the right hand edge. Further inspection reveals a few splash accretions to the lower centre. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultra-violet light.
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Against a vast background of matte flat white, a slew of forms in red, yellow, brown, and black emerge as if from a dense fog. Emblem is a work that is typical of Jean-Michel Basquiat at his most subversive: rife with implication but preclusive in specific meaning. Across these sparing rarefied motifs, he engages with themes both European and African, and makes reference not only to African-American cultural identity but also the canon of Western art. By the time the present work was created, Basquiat was confident and mature; no longer the precocious pretender threatening establishment norms, but the acknowledged prodigy, capable of producing devastatingly striking art works that perfectly distilled the zeitgeist of 1980s downtown New York.

1984 was a truly exciting year for Basquiat. In the year running up to the creation of the present work, he exhibited in seventeen group shows, and four major solo shows across America, Europe, and Japan, as well as becoming the youngest artist ever to be included in the Whitney Biennial at only 24 years old. Basquiat also met Andy Warhol in this year, who was to be his artistic mentor and collaborator, and provide inspiration and influence for the rest of his life. The creative confidence that this success instilled resulted in a newfound clarity of purpose and execution in Basquiat’s praxis; the highly assured utilisation of paint and the reduced yet profound artistic language employed within Emblem can be seen as manifestation of these alterations in style.

The composition of this work is centred upon two words written in Basquiat’s idiosyncratic capitalised oil stick scrawl: SCALO MERCI. Although the artist had spoken English, French, and Spanish fluently since the age of 11 – owing to his Haitian father, Puerto Rican mother, and New York upbringing – in this textual detail we are more compelled to think of Italy. SCALO MERCI translates as ‘Freight Yard’ from Italian, a phrase that not only speaks of Basquiat’s artistic beginnings spraying pithy slogans as ‘SAMO’ on the sides of New York subway trains, but also of the two exhibitions that he had already had in Modena, at the Galleria d’Arte Emilio Mazzoli in 1981, and at the Galleria Civica del Commune in 1982. However, the inclusion of this phrase should not be understood as a reference of any great specificity, nor as a bearer of any particular meaning. Basquiat’s use of ephemeral phraseology was part of the same process as his use of source material, visual stimuli, and art historical precedent. As prominent dealer and curator Jeffrey Deitch has described it: “Basquiat’s canvases are aesthetic dropcloths that catch the leaks from a whirring mind. He vacuums up cultural fall-out and spits it out on the stretched canvas, disturbingly transformed” (Jeffrey Deitch quoted in: Larry Warsh, Ed., Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Notebooks, New York 1993, p. 13).

However, if European influence can be inferred from the textual elements of this work, then the more graphic forms surely recall the strains of Haitian mythology, African identity, and African-American cultural history that were already central tenets of Basquiat’s oeuvre. The central form is unmistakabley an elephant, executed in a playful cartoonish manner with curly trunks and a little hat. Above it, two visage-like forms are delineated, one in yellow and one in a deep muddy brown. With their eyes reduced to hot red pointed ovals, and a thin outline of white around their boundary, they clearly intimate the tribal masks that populate so many of Basquiat’s most successful works. Africa was hugely important to Basquiat; he later organised an exhibition in Abidjan, on the Cote d’Ivoire, and truly felt that being on the continent was how he could get in touch with his inherited cultural identity, as diverted through ancestral Caribbean slave routes.

Nonetheless, to view this work as straightforward homage to traditional African visual culture would be to underestimate Basquiat’s constant reference to the heavyweights of art history. In this context, we can also discern the influence of Pablo Picasso on the present work. Basquiat greatly admired the work of the twentieth century master, and perennially quoted and re-appropriated his work. In Emblem, he uses Picasso – who had famously tackled the African tribal mask in works like Les Demoiselles d’Avignon – as a sort of art-historical sounding board; an antecedent tool-kit that might equip him to appropriately tackle that singular motif of primitivism. Moreover, in its instinctive linear abstractions, in the use of text in abstract manner, in the bold compositional decision to leave passages of the canvas in blank white, and in the obvious and overt phallic shapes, the present work seems entirely redolent of Cy Twombly. Twombly was a constant point of reference for Basquiat. In the words of René Ricard: “If Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet had a baby and gave it up for adoption, it would be Jean-Michel” (René Ricard, ‘The Radiant Child’, Artforum, December 1981, p. 35).

Emblem typifies the artistic confidence that Jean-Michel Basquiat attained as his career progressed. In this work, he veers away from the frenetic chaos of his earlier praxis, boldly deploying his forms in a more painterly rarefied manner, and relishing the prospect of taking on the titans of twentieth-century art history on their own terms.