JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT | Natives Carrying Things

Gallery Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich 
Private Collection, New York 
Sotheby's, New York, 16 November 1995, Lot 103
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner 

Kaohsiung, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts; Taichung, Taichung Museum, Jean-Michel Basquiat, January - June 1997, p. 61, illustrated in colour 
Tokyo, Mitsukoshi Museum Marugame, M.I.M.O.C.A., Jean-Michel Basquiat, October 1997 - April 1998, p. 61, illustrated in colour
Mexico City, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 2004, p. 49, illustrated
Bali, Darga Gallery, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 2005, p. 25, illustrated
New York, Nahmad Contemporary, Words Are All We Have: Paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat, May - June 2016, pp. 106-107, illustrated in colour (in installation), p. 115, illustrated in colour, and pp. 124-25, illustrated in colour (detail) 

Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Vol. I, Paris 1996, p. 204, illustrated in colour
Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Vol. I, Paris 2000, p. 199, illustrated in colour
Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Vol. II, Paris 2000, p. 157, no. 6, illustrated in colour
Enrico Navarra, ed., Jean-Michel Basquiat: Appendix, Paris 2010, p. 33 (text) 
Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer, Eds., Basquiat: Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown), Munich 2015, p. 60, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although they are more vibrant in the original. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
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Natives Carrying Things is an iconic work, immediately recognisable in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s signature style, and remarkable amongst his oeuvre for its scale, concision, and coherence. With this work, Basquiat tackled themes that are now considered central to his practice: colonialisation, commercialisation, and African-American history. It is a striking and arresting work of raw text and pared-back imagery; a painting that recalls the words of gallerist and curator Jeffrey Deitch: “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 stretched canvas, disturbingly transformed” (Jeffrey Deitch cited in: Larry Warsh, Ed., Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Notebooks, New York 1993, p. 13) Born to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, and raised in culturally diverse Brooklyn in the 1960s and 1970s, Basquiat was painfully aware of the shadow that colonialism had cast over his personal heritage and African-American culture at large. Whilst operating in an art world whose protagonists were almost exclusively white, he made paintings filled with explicit textual reference to European colonisation, the slave trade, and to the industries and commodities that were wholly reliant upon it: tobacco, cotton and, as is referenced in the present work, salt. Natives Carrying Things is deeply evocative of the potent Natives Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, Amorites on Safari, which Basquiat had made the previous year. Where that earlier work was overt in its references to the colonial era, featuring a cartoonish juxtaposition between the rifle-toting European and the sardonic trope of the 'African native', rendered in deep black paint, the present work is more idiosyncratically impactful and concise. Basquiat shows two figures, sparsely delineated, identifiable only through the near-abstract depiction of their grass skirts and abdominal muscles. They loom large on the canvas – almost life-size – but are shown devoid of detail; abstracted to the point of losing recognition. Basquiat intentionally reduces these figures in order to dehumanise them. With no individual characteristics or traits, they are generically and ironically stereotyped as 'natives'.

Basquiat’s interest in African and Oceanic culture was as erudite art historically as it was significant personally. He developed a close relationship of immense mutual respect with Robert Farris Thompson, the renowned Professor of African art at Yale. Introduced to Basquiat by the hip-hop artist Fab 5 Freddy, Thompson was wholly and immediately enamoured by Basquiat’s dramatic and informed painting style and has written about his work since, contextualising it within Post-Colonial thought. Thompson recognised the power of works such as Natives Carrying Things describing them as: “Incantations of his blackness, incantations of what he was afraid of… He’s like a classical African drummer, just translating his nervousness into art. It was as if he was trying to turn his fears into creative energy” (Robert Farris Thompson cited in: Phoebe Hoban, Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, New York 1998, p. 249).

Commodification and commerce were also central to Basquiat’s work. He was acutely aware of his almost alchemical ability to turn paintings into money; bragging that he could have painted over a gold bar and made it more even more valuable. He was playful, making a painting in 1982 called Five Thousand Dollars which consisted of a canvas painted in two shades of brown emblazoned with nothing but its intended sale value written in simple letters and numerals: the painting was its own price tag. The present work is similarly direct and is suffused with a palpable sense of colonial commerce. The food and salt being carried by the so-called ‘natives’ are packaged for sale and borne forth. The art historian Leonard Emmherling has written about the thematic links between food and commerce in Basquiat’s practice: “He does much with words for foods, chemical substances, and metals. The S, which represents Superman whenever it appears within a triangular logo and otherwise stands for the old tag SAMO, also stands in for ‘salt’. A 1981 drawing shows nothing more than the word ‘Milk’ emblazoned with a copyright sign. This drawing, also a kind of radical poesy, combines a staple food with the claim of control over its distribution and the consequent ability to draw a profit from it… Milk seems to be associated with the lyrics of a song that Basquiat often listened to, ‘Tell Me That I’m Dreaming’ by Don Was, with the immortal line: ‘Man needs milk, so he owns a million cows’” (Leonhard Emmerling, Jean-Michel Basquiat 1960 - 1988, New York 2003, p. 46).

Despite its sparse compositional style, Natives Carrying Things is dense with cultural inference and art-historical import. It is a direct and emblematic work that distils the essence of Basquiat’s oeuvre. In its powerful command of form and subject, we understand the sheer impact of the artist’s depictive force. In the words of curator Diego Cortez, “[Basquiat] constructs an intensity of line which reads like a polygraph report, a brain-to-hand ‘shake’. The figure is electronic-primitive-comic” (Diego Cortez cited in: Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Vol. II, Paris 1996, p. 160).