“As much as any music in my possession I listen to Beat Bop, the record that Basquiat produced with Rammellzee (recently departed) and K-Rob in 1983. It still sounds like now, which is how it sounded then. It’s perfectly in rhythm, perfectly in time. That’s what I see in the paintings and the drawings. Bigger than life. Living large life. Moments still radiant with thought and feeling. Everything that came from his hand is alive, giving off rays. It’s like that Charlie Parker song, “Now Is the Time.” Now is always the time. Boom. Boom for real.”
An icon of singular, radical artistic genius, Now’s the Time is the ultimate embodiment of the brilliant fusion of music and art which lies at the very heart of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s legendary career. Here, Basquiat recreates the vinyl pressing of Charlie Parker’s 1945 composition Now’s the Time in roughly hewn plywood on a grand scale to form a talismanic monument—both to that revered Jazz musician, who was foremost amongst Basquiat’s icons, and to the greater recognition, admiration and amplification of Black artistry, past and present, that was so central to Basquiat’s own artistic project. Executed in 1985, the present work announces Basquiat’s arrival at the apex of his international success and the very center of New York’s downtown zeitgeist with three emphatic words: Now’s the Time. This phrase – which has become a familiar slogan within the scholarship and cultural vernacular for the artist – holds more resonance now than ever; like the music of Charlie Parker, the impact of Basquiat’s monumental masterwork is immediate, universal, and utterly timeless, the force of his artistic vernacular as explosive today as it was at the moment of execution. With three words, Basquiat declares his place amongst the pantheon of Black artistic icons he admired, claiming the moment as his own and immortalizing the significance of his then radical, now canonical artistic project: Now’s the Time. Now is always the time.
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1998Jean-Michel Basquiat at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, 1998
Now’s the Time witnesses Basquiat radically pare down the explosive bravura of his street art-based paintings into an austere composition of inscriptions scribbled upon a tabula rasa of phantom black wood. His Minimalist gesture radically extends the aesthetic ideologies by the likes of Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, and Donald Judd in the contemporaneous mainstream art world into the domains of underground culture and music, while his sculptural gravitas resonates with the revolutionary subversion and heft of Marcel Duchamp's seminal readymades. Echoing the irregular silhouette of the wooden support, the lines of his white circles seem to crackle with electricity, vibrating on the surface like a rhythmic bassline. As a final touch, the artist emblazons his signature copyright sign upon the surface: both as a way of giving credit to Parker, and as a means of irrevocably marking the painting and declaration as his own. Testifying to its singular significance in Basquiat’s oeuvre, Now’s the Time has appeared as a major highlight in many of the Basquiat’s most acclaimed international exhibitions and retrospectives, at Brooklyn Museum, New York; Fondation Beyeler, Basel; and Art Gallery of Ontario, where it was the centerpiece of the eponymous exhibition entitled Jean Michel Basquiat: Now’s the Time; most recently, Now’s the Time was exhibited in the landmark exhibition at Montreal Museum of Art, Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music, where it was also prominently illustrated on the cover of the exhibition catalogue. Like a black nova, Now’s the Time asserts its presence with its gravitational pull, luring viewers into Basquiat’s ultimate aesthetic rhapsody on the timeless sensational ecstasy of bebop and jazz.
From Duke Ellington to The Velvet Underground, Madonna to James Brown, Jean-Michel Basquiat was an avid collector of music albums and records, having grown up in Brooklyn listening to his father’s record collection of jazz classics. In the 1970s and 1980s, Basquiat emerged from the cultural milieu of downtown New York, DJing and performing at such underground venues as the Mudd Club where genres including punk, no wave and hip-hop melded into new, avant-garde musical forms. It was the sonic rhythms of jazz, however, that Basquiat found the most creative influence on his working method, with his radically instinctual aesthetics echoing Charles Parker’s maverick freedom of improvisation and fast-tempo style of bebop. Beginning in 1983, Basquiat privileged on jazz as a key subject in his work, altogether creating over thirty paintings in tribute to jazz legend Charlie Parker. “As Jean-Michel’s painting took off, he started spending more time inside, working in the studio, where music was always playing,” Glenn O’Brien observes. “Now he could have any music he wanted and he began to explore jazz seriously…” (Glenn O’Brien, “Basquiat and Jazz” in Exh. Cat., Fondazione Triennale di Milano, The Jean-Michel Basquiat Show, 2007, p. 52).
Select Jean-Michel Basquiat Paintings in tribute to Charlie Parker
“As Jean-Michel’s painting took off, he started spending more time inside, working in the studio, where music was always playing. Now he could have any music he wanted and he began to explore jazz seriously…”
By colliding the musical rhythms of pop culture with the annals of art history, Basquiat championed an instinctive working method that broadly paralleled the improvisatory production of jazz: as O’Brien continues, he “knew about Miles Davis and John Coltrane and Charlie Parker the same way he knew about Picasso and Duchamp and Pollock.” (Glenn O’Brien quoted in: Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art, Oakland 2014, p. 82) In Now’s The Time, the gestural scrawls and inscriptions of Basquiat’s SAMO, his former graffiti alter-ego of the late 1970s, evolve succinctly into a mature and austere refinement of his artistic enterprise, announcing the very apex of his revolutionary style and career. Under the alias SAMO, Basquiat roamed the urban streets of New York, emblazoning his moniker and chosen icons – the three point crown and the acquisitive © – upon the abandoned walls of his native city. Sacrificing none of the swagger and spirit behind his pithy linguistic arsenal, Basquiat scrawls his signature copyright symbol onto the underscored title “Now’s The Time” as if to claim the slogan as his own; simultaneously, he iconizes the saxophonist’s name into the shorthand designation “PRKR,” linking SAMO and PRKR as if mirror images. Magnified to epic proportions, Now’s The Time elevates the vinyl record to an object of prestige and worship, sanctifying Charlie Parker in an epitaph of his influence on music and culture.
Executed four decades following Charlie Parker’s original production of Now’s the Time, Basquiat’s 1985 masterpiece also takes this musical composition as the locus and inspiration through which he interprets the positionality that Black artists occupy in twentieth-century America. This melody was first used for “The Hucklebuck,” a hit for saxophonist Paul Williams four years after Parker's original recording, but the composition was wrongly attributed by the record company to another songwriter named Andy Gibson. In the present work, Basquiat restores credit to Parker as the original and undeniable creator of this song with the explicit notation “PRKR.” In doing so, he subverts the record company’s error and introduces a symbolic critique of the alienation often faced by Black artists from the larger cultural industries that disseminate their music and art. As a maverick Black artist working in the predominately white art world during the late twentieth century, Basquiat looked to creative predecessors like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, who similarly forged their own creative paths within a context of pervasive racism during the 1940s and 1950s.
Though Basquiat once referred to Miles Davis as his favorite musician, it was Charlie Parker who ultimately figured as his all-time personal hero: his brief recording career lasting only one decade from 1945 to 1955, Parker was a largely self-taught saxophonist who only took music seriously after playing in his high-school marching band and whose career trajectory paralleled that of Basquiat’s. Trailblazing the style of bebop that is best exemplified by the sonic rhythms of the eponymous composition, Parker eschewed mainstream audiences; instead, he demanded to be considered seriously for his revolutionary sonic complexity that synthesized an inventively fast tempo, alternating chord progressions, and above all else, an undying freedom of improvisation. The modernity of the bebop sound that Parker innovated, as well as the urgency of ending racial segregation in the wake of World War II through which he lived, are both no better suggested than in the call to action behind the present composition’s title: “Now’s The Time.” Glenn O’Brien connects the thunderous force of Parker’s music to that of Basquiat’s art when he states, “It’s perfectly in rhythm, perfectly in time. That’s what I see in [Basquiat’s] paintings… Moments still radiant with thought and feeling. Everything that came from his hand is alive, giving off rays. It’s like that Charlie Parker song, ‘Now Is the Time.’ Now is always the time. Boom. Boom for real” (Glenn O'Brien, "Basquiat: The Show Must Go On," 17 September 2013 (online))
"[Basquiat] knew about Miles Davis and John Coltrane and Charlie Parker the same way he knew about Picasso and Duchamp and Pollock.”
Limiting his palette to a monochromatic black and white in Now’s The Time, Basquiat decisively renounces figurative representation in favor of pure text and symbology. His white-on-black technique is restrained yet elegant, possessing a beauty and stillness that evoke the rigors of Minimalism while preserving the grit of his downtown urban environs. The raw immediacy of white oilstick on empty black background imbues the wooden surface with energy, pulling the viewer into the gravitas of Basquiat’s subject matter while engrossing them in the sheer monumentality of this downtown object. In his monograph on Basquiat, Fred Hoffman suggests that the artist’s “reversal” technique of using white oilstick on black canvas in paintings such Now’s The Time reflects his metaphorical acknowledgement of racism in the American society he navigated. Inverting the black and white polarity of a traditional grayscale composition, Basquiat symbolically turned the oppressive dualism of racism on its head: “Much like a sorcerer seeks to turn lead into gold, the young artist...sought to radically transform the content and meaning of image and text. By reversing the information conveyed in these drawings, Basquiat demonstrated to both himself and the world that he possessed the capacity, through one simple act, to turn a world dominated by white into one where black dominates” (Fred Hoffman, The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York 2017, p. 95).
Immortalizing not only Charlie Parker’s legacy on the history of music, but also the artist himself at the absolute zenith of his short-lived yet seismic career, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Now’s The Time is the most remarkable icon of his oeuvre. Though Basquiat would die only three years later in 1988, through the terse, declaration of the present work’s title, he suspends the fleeting moment of his international stardom in 1985 into everlasting eternity. While abstaining from the expressionist fury normally associated with Basquiat’s paintings, this irregular shape maintains the profound and uncensored intensity which pervades so much of his oeuvre as he, like Parker in his time, mobilized from the avant garde underground to the upper stratas of the mainstream. Ultimately rejoicing in “the innovative power of black male jazz musicians, whom he reveres as creative father figures,” with Now’s the Time, Basquiat creates a monument to his legendary career and influences that resounds with the grand vibrations of his timeless genius. (bell hooks, “Altars of Sacrifice: Remembering Basquiat”, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, New York 1994, P. 35)
