Jean-Michel Basquiat

Annina Nosei Gallery, New York
Marlborough Gallery, New York
Christie's, New York, May 13, 1995, lot 52
Acquired by the present owner from the above

New York, Gallery Schlesinger, Basquiat Paintings, November 1988
Cincinnati, Contemporary Arts Center; Santa Barbara, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Beautiful Losers, March - October 2004

Richard D. Marshall and Jean Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 2nd Ed., Paris, 1996, Vol. 2, p. 92, illustrated in color
Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 3rd Ed., Paris, 2000, Vol. 2, p. 104, illustrated in color

Constructed around a stark central figure, Donut Revenge is a powerful example of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s artistic vocabulary. Throughout his production, Basquiat frequently painted his own image in his canvases, both more or less explicitly. In Donut Revenge, he lays bare his soul on the canvas with the impact of a physical blow. He portrays himself as a character that is both comically child-like and desperate at the same time, who expresses the rage and anxiety of Basquiat’s short and troubled life. But like all great artists, Basquiat is able to direct the dramatic texture of his existential angst into an artistic universal language.

Donut Revenge was executed in 1982, the year considered by many to be the peak of the artist’s oeuvre and marking his meteoric rise in the art world of 1980s New York.  Basquiat had garnered attention in his first group exhibitions in New York at P.S. 1 and at the Annina Nosei Gallery, followed soon after by his first one-man show with Nosei in January 1982. Having relinquished his street pseudonym of SAMO in 1980, Basquiat was able to redirect his unique creative powers to the canvas, creating a vocabulary nurtured by symbolic masks, autobiographical events and memories, tribal art, and references to painting styles and techniques of established twentieth-century artists whom he admired.

Many tributaries come together to form the vocabulary displayed in Donut Revenge including the comic book cartoons of Basquiat’s childhood, primitive and African art, and his past experiences as a graffiti artist. All these visual and sensory impressions are incorporated into a shockingly distinct contemporary work of art, full of magical power and significance, for which we can recall Andre Malraux’s famous quote from the 1940s about the original terror of primitive art when first discovered and incorporated into Western culture. “Thus there was no question of deciding what place in the museum should be assigned to these primitive arts; for once they are allowed fully and freely to voice their message, they do not merely invade the museum: they burn it down.” (Tony Shafrazi, Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York, 1999, p. 13)

Donut Revenge depicts one of the artist’s semi-autobiographical characters, filled with tension from his spiky hair to his clenched teeth. Sharp, nail-like protrusions painfully extend from his arms and legs. Above his head, a veritable crown of thorns hovers, while he screams in an incomprehensible language. In Donut Revenge, the bright colors have been violently thrown onto the canvas in a painterly gesture which is bold and deliberately unschooled, reflecting Basquiat’s creative urge to express his emotions. Since Jackson Pollock, never an aesthetic gesture has had such a strong impact: primary images and word images seem to emerge right off the brush, in a new form of ‘action painting’

“His works have a quality that seems to draw you in; it is like they offered some kind of clue to solving the puzzle of what’s in his mind. It sounds easy, but it is quite difficult for an artist to achieve that. The words, symbols and body parts that he uses all come together to form an expression of what he is thinking of as an artist, and this is something that I find remarkable.” (Jeffrey Deitch, as reported in King for a Decade, Kyoto, Japan, 1997, p. 143)

By reducing the form and the matter of Donut Revenge, Basquiat cultivates an entirely new de-formalization of the painted image. His deliberate and artificial transcriptions of ‘primary’ graphic gestures into an idiosyncratic and strongly defined formal idiom represented a major expansion of the boundaries of art.  Ultimately, Donut Revenge is a painting that speaks of our time, our fears and our abandonment, expressed in the artist’s multi-racial, universal language.