Jean-Michel Basquiat

Mary Boone Gallery, New York / Bruno Bischofberger Gallery, Zurich
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1984

New York, Mary Boone Gallery, Jean-Michel Basquiat, May 1984

Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1992, p. 244, illustrated (in installation at Mary Boone Gallery, New York, 1984)
Bernard Blistene, Dr. Elena Ochoa, Robert Farris Thompson and Richard D. Marshall, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Works on Paper, Paris, 1999, pp. 356-357, illustrated (in installation at Mary Boone Gallery, New York, 1984)
Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 3rd Ed., Vol. II, Paris, 2000, p. 281, illustrated (in installation at Mary Boone Gallery, New York, 1984)
Exh. Cat., Riehen/Basel, Fondation Beyeler (and travelling), Basquiat, 2010, p. 135, illustrated (in installation at Mary Boone Gallery, New York, 1984) (Riehen/Basel) and p. 129, illustrated (in installation at Mary Boone Gallery, New York, 1984) (Paris)

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at +1 (212) 606-7254 for the report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is not framed.
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Emerging from a dynamic patchwork of abstract swathes and anchoring the cerebral magnetism of the central black form, small and regimented  daubs of white paint coalesce to articulate the impression of white teeth glistening in darkness.  Supported by the pulsating red of lips and gums, we can discern the impression of a haunting mouth, screaming out from the enigma of an unidentifiable face.  Thematizing a penetratingly existential howl, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s arresting Untitled (Wax) breaks the silence of its own rigid formal structure and shatters the canvas into pictorial frenzy.  Created in the important year of 1984, at the height of the young prodigy’s unprecedented success, this hypnotically cryptic work embodies the artist’s acute employment of revolutionary semiotic strategies to articulate profoundly political themes. The work belongs to a small number of pieces in which the artist adorned his canvas with secret markings – visible only under concentrated Ultra Violet light – to embellish the complex semantic games through which he drastically altered the symbolic functioning of the painted medium. As such, Untitled (Wax) stands as a cunningly coded provocation to reconsider the place and status of the African American male in the meta-narrative of art history. Challenging the relationship between image, text and abstraction, Basquiat questions painting’s unstable position within the paradigms of illusion and truth.

Despite having gained commercial representation just two years prior, by 1984 Jean-Michel Basquiat had garnered significant international recognition, experiencing a string of career milestones. In this year Basquiat’s first museum exhibition opened at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh (which later travelled to the Institute for Contemporary Arts, London and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam), his seminal collaborations with Pop Art founding father Andy Warhol were shown for the first time, and the two formidable gallerists, Mary Boone and Bruno Bischofberger, became his primary dealers.  Standing as a refined product of the most coveted painter of a generation, who was steadily defining the key tenants of the Neo-Expressionist idiom at the time of its creation, the present work exploits Basquiat’s renowned visual lexicon to its fullest.

In Untitled (Wax) Basquiat centralized one of his most powerful motifs that functions as a quasi-self-portrait: the abstracted face or figure, whose racial identity is marked out by a symbolic use of black paint. With raw red lips and white teeth that evoke racist visual stereotypes of nineteenth-century minstrelsy, Basquiat establishes an immediately provocative emblem of African-American identity within the history of western visual culture.  As noted by Marc Mayer, “The many works in this 'icon' category have a familiar ritual function, not unlike the West African sculptures and masks that Basquiat collected when he traveled there, the functional Vodoun and Santeria figures of his Caribbean roots that descended from them, or Western religious icons and statuettes meant to embody a given saint or represent Jesus Christ.” (Marc Mayer, “Basquiat in History,” Basquiat, New York, 2005, p. 51)  Here, Basquiat creates a symbolic surrogate for his unique positon as an untrained, often exoticized, artist of Puerto-Rican and Haitian descent within a predominantly white art scene, reclaiming the canvas of history for his semi-autobiographical idol. With ecclesiastic red and black lines dispersing out from the figurehead, we encounter the 'radiant child' that René Ricard introduced the artist as in his seminal Artforum article from 1981, which provided the catalyst for Basquiat’s burgeoning recognition.

The emblematic head stands in stark contrast to the cool white and luscious pastel pink that structure its immediate milieu, extending the inherent subtext of historic racial prejudice by establishing contrasts between the naïve analogies of skin tones.  Demarcating three structured fields of color, enlivened with hasty expressionistic gesture and acute variations in texture, the reverberating formal tectonics of the present work evoke the painterly language of Clyfford Still and Franz Kline. By placing his ‘radiant child’ within the context of Abstract Expressionism, Basquiat carves a place for black subjectivity within the dominant narratives of the artistic canon, specifically that of American painting.  As surmised by cultural theorist Dick Hebidge "… in the reduction of line into its strongest, most primary inscriptions, in that peeling of the skin back to the bone, Basquiat did us all a service by uncovering (and recapitulating) the history of his own construction as a black American male." (Dick Hebidge, "Welcome to the Terrordome: Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Dark Side of Hybridity," in Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1993, p. 65)

The indisputable genius of Basquiat lies within his interweaving of ‘high culture’ references and ultra-specific quotidian symbols across time, medium and genre. Here the piercing scream of the gaping mouth recalls Francis Bacon’s nightmarish reinterpretations of Velàzquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X. Developing this metaphysical angst, Basquiat also channels the profound existentialism and absurdist dislocation of Samuel Beckett’s 1972 monologue Not I, which was performed through a disembodied mouth illuminated with a single spotlight in a blackened theater. Yet, as part of his constant games of signification, Basquiat’s references never settle in one place. The mouth also draws from his longstanding fascination with medical drawings, inspired by a copy of Gray’s Anatomy gifted to him by his mother following a childhood accident. In the various swatches of color and the hastily effaced letters of “GREEN,” Basquiat draws us into a world of visual and linguistic riddles that recalls his interest in the 'hobo code' set out in Henry Dreyfuss’ Symbol Sourcebook, as well as the ‘SAMO’ graffiti tags that he and Al Diaz marked through the streets of Soho as youths.

By perpetually compromising the fixed legibility of his marks, Basquiat proposes a conscious challenge to the viewer: “I cross out words so you will want to see them more; the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them.” (the artist cited in Graham Lock and David Murray, Eds., The Hearing Eye: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Visual Culture, Oxford, 2008, p. 262) Symptomatic of this communicative aloofness, it is only under concentrated Ultra Violet light that the full detailed splendor of his amorphous narrative unveils. Almost distinguishable due to subtle textural relief, these hidden symbols lurk beneath the surface of Untitled (Wax), imbuing the canvas with an even more pronounced and captivating complexity. The word “GREEN” is in fact supplemented by “PANTS” and the words “RED KOREAN” in the right-hand white segment. This reflects an ongoing interest in the language of commerce that was partly inspired by his contemporaneous collaborations with Warhol.  Most crucially Basquiat’s central icon is adorned with additional glowing lines radiating outwards and imbuing it with divine splendor. Whilst we might initially perceive the figure as blind, the UV illumination reveals a large oval encircling the word “EYE” at the center of its forehead. Basquiat’s eye logo appears in other works, including Warhol collaborations and Eye Africa of the same year which makes a more solemn allusion to the historic exploitation of the African continent and its diaspora.  Whilst also evoking the gargantuan cyclops creatures of Greek mythology, here the employment of the motif as a ‘third eye’ forms a locus of subversive consciousness and the exceptional wisdom assigned otherwise to a deity. Perfecting its divine iconography amidst a sea of symbolic abstraction, Basquiat thus ascribes his ‘radiant child’ with acute sensibilities and a unique vision that radically expands the social purview of the fine art establishment.