Brimming with tremendous graphic force and ferocious mark marking, Untitled from 1983 is a riveting embodiment of the instinctive and unrivaled brilliance which distinguishes Jean-Michel Basquiat’s artistic oeuvre. The present work is one from a series of twelve silkscreen print based on a collage of 28 drawings mounted on canvas and drawn over in oil-stick. Replete with the hallmark iconography and dazzling energy of Basquiat’s unique and coveted pictorial lexicon, and punctuated by a single mask like face, Untitled fuses image, word, and sound in vibrant medley that contends with some of the most important and enduring subjects and concerns of the artist’s pioneering practice.

For the present series of silkscreens, Basquiat chose to invert the original work, in which his off-white notebook pages were scrawled over with black oilstick. Fred Hoffman recalls that with these editioned silkscreens, Basquiat felt a deep “concern for incorporating the dichotomy between black and white into both the content and the strategies of his artistic production.” (Marc Mayer, Basquiat, New York 2010, p. 130) Referencing Untitled , Hoffman writes that: “a primary example [of this] is the artist’s fraught self-transformation from black to white in the untitled silkscreen on canvas of 1983: in the original artwork, the artist depicted a black head set on top of a ground of texts and images; but the silkscreen reverses the positive imagery and texts, turning everything originally depicted in black into white, and everything white into black. Basquiat throughout his career focused on other suggestive dichotomies, including wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience." (Ibid., p. 130)

Emerging from a field of black, a single, white mask-like face radiates like a ghostly apparition; void of detail, the blank face is punctuated by a pair of cavernous eyes. Behind the central figure, Basquiat’s notebook pages create a compositional grid, a cacophony of text and imagery that, when taken as a whole, map out the vast genius of Basquiat’s inner thinking. Limited to a monochromatic palette and inverting the positive and negative space of the original composition, the present composition reads like a photographic negative; restrained and refined, Untitled possesses an arresting elegance that evokes the rigor of minimalism while remaining deeply informed by Basquiat’s gritty, street aesthetic.

Basquiat was an avid autodidact, picking up images, words and music everywhere he went, absorbing and applying them in his paintings, drawings, and most significantly, in his notebook pages. In Untitled, each frenzied vignette presents poetic text and visual mantra of its own: fragmented song lyrics, diagrams, agglomerations, scatterings, and lists. Like white chalk on a black chalkboard, Basquiat here seems intent on teaching a lesson to the uninitiated.

In these vignettes, Basquiat lays bare the cultural and aesthetic influences which form the core of his practice, offering the viewer an unmediated look into mind’s inner workings as he distills his perceptions down to their essence and, in turn, projecting them outward in explosive bursts of dazzling pictorial brilliance. The merging of image and word is deeply emblematic of Basquiat’s pioneering technique. Inspired by artists such as Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg, Basquiat’s inclusion of text in his artworks is, simultaneously, reminiscent of his graffiti days in the 1970s as part of the street-art duo SAMO©. Basquiat was riveted by different modes of human expression and communication, and frequently incorporated within his paintings a series of codes found in Henry Dreyfuss’s Symbol Sourcebook. He took a particular interest in the 'hobo signs' which travelling vagabonds would use to denote certain areas as safe or treacherous along the road, and indeed several of the signs appear within the present work, signifying warnings such as 'There are thieves about', 'Dangerous drinking water', and 'You’ll be cursed out'. Many of these symbols, carried throughout his practice, are repeated like incantations in his drawings and paintings.

Despite his meteoric ascension from graffiti street artist to New York art world icon in the early 1980s, as a young black man Basquiat faced a great deal of racial discrimination. In his recent monograph on the artist, scholar Fred Hoffman suggests that Basquiat’s “reversal” technique in works such as the present might be considered as a symbolic acknowledgement of racism. This might be Basquiat’s way of “reversing the norm,” Hoffman suggests—a way to turn racism on its head. He writes: “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) Basquiat’s remarkable pictorial language is simultaneously revealing of a man who was greatly troubled by the vast dichotomy between the desire to create his own reality, and the stifling rules and restrictions of a society to which, as a black artist in the American 1980s, he was all too often subjected. As with all artistic geniuses, Basquiat left a resounding mark on the art world that continues to reverberate well into the present day. An explosive whirlwind of sensation and intrigue, Untitled vividly embodies the raw, visceral syntax of Basquiat’s ground-breaking style.

Artist

Jean-Michel Basquiat