“70-75 beats per minute is a normal heart rate. Once upon a time in the 80s, the pace was quicker, and Jean-Michel Basquiat's pulse was faster than most... So watch the artist use it. For even now—and especially in drawings such as these—it is all still happening right before your eyes.”
An incendiary image of warrior, deity, artist, and hero erupts in technicolor in Untitled from 1981, in which Jean-Michel Basquiat prophetically manifests the invention, innovation, and staggering appetite for creation that would drive the rest of his career. Executed in 1981, the critical year which heralded his ascent from SAMO ©, the street provocateur, to the prodigy of the mainstream art world—during which time he also began producing artworks under his own name—Untitled powerfully asserts the clairvoyant vision of a figure predicting their own victory: aflame, unblinking, and crowned with a triumphal laurel wreath. Spanning more than five feet in width, the composition swells with the sheer enormity of the sheet, so heavily and repeatedly worked that it bears the full-throttle voltage of the artist’s best paintings. Treasured for more than three decades in the same private collection and virtually unseen by the public since its acquisition in 1989, Untitled stands vivid and alive, as vital now as it was at the moment of execution. Here, at just twenty years of age, Basquiat encodes Untitled with a kind of hieroglyphic power as he composes a mythology of his own invention, and, in doing so, simultaneously reifies and anticipates one of his most iconic proclamations: “I’m not a real person. I’m a legend.” (Jean-Michel Basquiat quoted in: Anthony Haden-Guest, “Burning Out”, Vanity Fair, November 1988, p. 197)
At the very core of Basquiat’s electric yet calamitously brief career was a spectacularly lucid iconographical infrastructure, one anchored by the signs and signals through which Basquiat communicated his worldview and personal history. Untitled sees Basquiat wrestle with the symbolic vernacular he would engage and expand throughout his career, among them antiquity and the self. Layer upon frenzied layer of emerald, vermilion, and turquoise oilstick burst forth like both flames and feathers, spraying a resplendent, chromatic kaleidoscope onto the ivory field of Basquiat’s sheet. With its clawed fingers, the lone figure resembles Aztec depictions of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god of creation and knowledge, while his outstretched arm compositionally echoes God’s posture in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam—both symbolic representations of the inception of man. Through these themes Basquiat tapped into the raw and unconcealed, exuding a palpable sense of confidence as he fashions a singularly victorious creature, perhaps alluding to a vision of his own future and legacy: a man on the verge of stardom, reborn as artist and icon. Around the figure Basquiat plots gauges, compasses, and charts, all of which are so furiously articulated they read like a frenzied oracle for his future, like a speedometer revealing Basquiat’s creative force accelerating beyond measure, malfunctioning in the face of Basquiat’s caustic, chaotic, and revolutionary pictures.
1981 represented a moment of meteoric rise and catalytic change for Basquiat. In Jeffery Deitch’s words, it represented “the year of transition between the street and the studio. In early 1981 he was mainly painting on discarded windows, doors and pieces of wood and metal that he found on the street, and making drawings on reams of typing paper. By the end of 1981, he was installed in a spacious studio in the basement of Annina Nosei’s gallery on Prince Street and working on prepared canvas.” (Jeffrey Deitch, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1981: The Studio of the Street, New York 2006, p. 10) Executed in the throes of this metamorphosis, Untitled is legible as a parable of this transformation and the celebrity that would follow in 1982.
Two forms of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl on folio 19 of Codex Laud, c. 15th century
Revealing Basquiat’s iconic clawed fingers, the lone figure taking center stage in Untitled invokes the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl, a feathered serpent god of creation and knowledge. As evidenced by frequent referrals to Mesopotamian, Egyptian, or Central American mythology, allegorical imagery is an essential device that Basquiat harnesses to tap into a raw and visceral sensibility.
Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles, 1952
Even beyond what is immediately visible in the present work’s composition, the dust and footprints visible on the picture plane also highlight the physical exertion undeniably essential in Basquiat’s practice. Much like the action painting of Jackson Pollock that charted both the artist’s mind and his physical choreography, Untitled traces the immediacy and urgency that accompanies Basquiat’s process.
Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, c. 1512
Untitled’s protagonist peers through the picture plane with outstretched arms that evoke the composition of Michelangelo’s portrayal of God in the iconic fresco The Creation of Adam. Although separated by centuries, both artworks—limbs extended, reaching for the beyond—reflect the artists’ dedications to illuminate the inception of man.
Gustave Courbet, Le Désespéré, 1843-45
The figure of the present work peers directly at the viewer with an intense, powerful gaze that echoes what one can observe in Gustave Courbet’s self-portrat from the 1800s. Much like the earlier painting that harnesses the power of emotions through its dramatic composition, Untitled and its acerbic deployment of color and line present a ferocious and spirited protagonist.
Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950-52
The vibrant colors and energetic brushstrokes of Willem de Kooning’s 1950s Women paintings finds a matching urgency in Basquiat’s Untitled. The maelstroms of orange, blue, and yellow underscore the intensity characteristic to both artists’ practices.
Basquiat scores the figure’s abdomen with a grid-like ribcage—a device repeated across several major works, such as Untitled (Boxer)—in what could be understood as an homage to both the strength at the core of his protagonist and the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib. Basquiat’s obsession with the architecture of the body originates from a decisive incident in the artist’s childhood when, after being hit by a car, Basquiat broke his arm. It was during his hospitalization that the artist’s mother gave him a copy of the seminal medical tome Gray’s Anatomy, an anecdotal genesis that would inform the present work, among others of Basquiat’s most diagrammatically incisive paintings. Beatifying his figure with the triumphal laurel wreath, Basquiat thus finalizes his iconographical alchemy, as if invoking cross-cultural narratives to not only forecast but initiate the birth and triumph, regeneration and success that would define the next decade of his life.
“With direct and theatrically ham-fisted brushwork, he uses unmixed color structurally, like a seasoned abstractionist, but in the service of a figurative and narrative agenda. Basquiat deployed his color architecturally, at times like so much tinted mortar to bind a composition, at other times like opaque plaster to embody it. Color holds his pictures together, and through it they command a room."
Palimpsests of comparable art historical masterworks emerge in Untitled, from canonical self portraits to the acerbic deployment of color and line. The figure’s unblinking gaze echoes that of Gustave Courbet’s panicked eye contact in Le Désespéré, while the maelstrom of orange oilstick recalls the flaming gestures of Pablo Picasso’s Yo, Picasso. As a whole, the ferocity of Basquiat’s works on paper fuse the urgency of Willem de Kooning’s Women of the 1950s with the graphic ciphers of Cy Twombly’s Ferragosto suite. The weight of art history evinces itself, too, beyond the formal qualities of Untitled—the paper itself bears the dust and footprints from Basquiat’s studio throughout, insisting on the performative element of Basquiat's practice that have cemented his stature as a twentieth century giant and has been immortalized in documentary photographs.
Just as Jackson Pollock's drip paintings chart the artist's physical choreography as well as his psyche, so too is Untitled an index of the ingenious mind who created it. Basquiat’s drawings were utterly foundational to his practice: he was always drawing, whether working on paper or canvas, and as such, his works on paper serve as the cornerstone of his practice, privileged with a status far beyond the preparatory. Robert Storr writes, “Scarred, torn, and trampled, much of his work on paper bears the direct imprint of his urgency. Drawing, for [Basquiat], was something you did rather than something done, an activity rather than a medium. The seemingly throw-away sheets that carpeted his studio might appear little more than warm-ups for painting, except that the artist... kept the best for constant reference and re-use. Or, kept them because they were, quite simply, indestructibly vivid.” (Robert Storr, “Two Hundred Beats Per Min,” in: Exh. Cat., New York, Robert Miller Gallery, Basquiat Drawings, 1990, n.p.)
“[Basquiat’s] work is likely to remain for a long time as the modern picture of what it looks like to be brilliant, driven, and young.“
Born out of the compulsive creative urge that would stoke his output for years to come, the pure electricity of Basquiat's young and unrestrained vision comes to life in Untitled, in which his ingenuity spills forth—unadulterated and uninterrupted—from oilstick to paper like magic. Though tragically curtailed by his untimely death seven years later, Basquiat’s sprint to greatness, toward his own apotheosis, is bafflingly fast, unraveling before the viewer with psychic gravity. It is here that we feel the indisputable truth of Storr’s observation that “in drawings such as these - it is all still happening right before your eyes.” (Robert Storr, ibid., n.p.)
Unlock the Mythology Hidden in Basquiat’s 'Untitled' (1981)
