Jean-Michel Basquiat

Annina Nosei Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Paris, Galerie Enrico Navarra, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings, Sculptures, Works on Paper and Drawings, November - December 1989, pp. 32 - 33, illustrated in color
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Houston, Menil Collection; Des Moines Art Center; Montgomery, Museum of Fine Arts, Jean-Michel Basquiat, October 1992 - January 1994, p. 24, illustrated (detail), p. 152, illustrated in color
Paris, Galerie Enrico Navarra, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings, April - June 1996 
Kaohsiung, Museum of Fine Arts; Taichung Museum, Jean-Michel Basquiat, January - June 1997, pp. 52 - 53, illustrated
Seoul, Gallery Hyundai, Jean-Michel Basquiat, July - August 1997, pp. 48 - 49, illustrated
Vancouver, Art Beatus, Jean-Michel Basquiat, September - October 1997, pp. 34 - 35, illustrated
Tokyo, Mitsukoshi Museum; Marugame, M.I.M.O.C.A., Jean-Michel Basquiat, October 1997 - May 1998, p. 18, illustrated in color (detail) and pp. 50 - 51, illustrated in color
São Paulo, Pinacoteca, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Pinturas, June - September 1998, p. 61, illustrated in color, pp. 62 - 63, illustrated in color, and p. 112, illustrated in color (detail)
Venice, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Basquiat a Venezia, June - October 1999, pp. 86 - 87, illustrated
Naples, Castel Nuovo, Jean-Michel Basquiat, December 1999 - February 2000, pp. 70 - 71, illustrated
Rome, Chiostro del Bramante, Jean-Michel Basquiat, January - March 2002, pp. 86-87, illustrated in color
Paris, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Histoire d'une oeuvre, 2003, pp. 66 - 67, illustrated 
Cologne, Jablonka Galerie, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings, October 2003 - January 2004
Mexico City, Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 2004, pp. 46 - 47, illustrated
New York, Brooklyn Museum; Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art; Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, Basquiat, March 2005 - February 2006, p. 106, illustrated in color; detail, illustrated in color on the cover of the Members Preview brochure and illustrated in color on the back cover of the Members Preview brochure

Michel Enrici, J. M. Basquiat, Paris, 1989, pp. 72 - 73, illustrated in color
Cimaise, November - December 1989, vol. 36, pp. 2-3, illustrated in color (advertisment for Galerie Enrico Navarra 1989 exhibition)
Artforum International, December 1989, vol. 28, pp. 56-57, illustrated in color (advertisment for Galerie Erico Navarra 1989 exhibition)
Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris, 1996, 1st ed., vol. 1, pp. 130 - 131, illustrated in color
Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris, 1996, 2nd ed., vol. 1, pp. 180 - 181, illustrated in color
Toni Shafrazi et al., Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York, 1999, pp. 194 - 195, illustrated in color and p. 320, illustrated in color
Galerie Enrico Navarra, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Drawings, New York, 1999, p. 369, illustrated in color (detail)
Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris, 2000, 3rd ed., vol. 1, pp. 174 - 175, illustrated in color and vol. 2, no. 2, p. 162, illustrated in color

Due to the importance of this painting to the current Basquiat retrospective, this work has been promised to the final venue at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston rom November 18, 2005 - February 12, 2006.

El Gran Espectaculo (History of Black People) is one of the most important masterpieces by Jean-Michel Basquiat to ever appear at auction. Executed at the height of his artistic maturity before the urban energy of his formative years on the streets of New York had been distorted by art world success and stardom, the epic scale and autobiographical rawness of this painting epitomize the intuitive technique and narrative complexity of Basquiat’s painting style. The present work tackles the most critical and personal subject of Basquiat’s career in monumental form and is a superlative testament to the young artist’s technical ability. In a bravura of natural draughtsmanship and fluid painterly ability, muscular passages of brushwork form layers of meaning and pictorial structure before our eyes, with each idea informing (and deconstructing) the next in a climactic dialogue between the artist and his subject.

Art for Basquiat was a means of self discovery and a voyage into the troubled depths of his own identity. He often spoke of his childhood visits to the museums of New York where he rarely if ever saw any depictions of black people in paintings. As such he was eternally conscious of his black identity within a white dominated art-world, and although he never strayed into the realm of the overtly political, the subject of racial (in)equality and all the themes associated with it became the unequivocal focus of his creative vision. Born in Brooklyn in 1960 to a Haitian father and New York Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat’s mixed racial heritage instilled in him the mentality of an outsider and with it a rebellious freedom that invigorates his art. Basquiat had an enormous and inquisitive hunger for central as well as marginal forms of culture and knowledge. He sought to absorb from both the Western and African traditions of his roots, immersing himself simultaneously in the mysticism of Voodoo and primitive traditions and in the living mythology of the art, sports and musical stars of American popular culture. These diverse and often conflicting influences upon Basquiat’s identity provide an indispensable key to understanding the vitality and often violent complexity of his work.

There is a deceptive naivety to Basquiat’s art that allies him to the honoured tradition of Pop and Minimalist simplification. Although he had no formal artistic training, Basquiat sought to absorb the styles and techniques of the artists he most admired, perceiving in their work both licence and instruction whilst evolving his own vocabulary of forms and ideas derived from urban existence. Basquiat’s painting style fuses the incised brutality of Dubuffet, with the painterly expressionism of de Kooning and Kline. In its all-over, compositional abstraction and use of primitive hieroglyphs we find reference to Jackson Pollock’s early paintings. First among equals however was Cy Twombly - one of the few artists acknowledged by Basquiat as being an influence - whose stream of consciousness scrawl poetry paved the way for Basquiat to paint with unfettered energy and creative spontaneity.

Basquiat’s method of painting is one of provocative energy and builds upon what Rauschenberg, Johns and Twombly made possible through their rediscovery of the primitive ‘wall’ in art. Like them, Basquiat does not seek to decorate the space but conquer it and this monumental triptych pulsates with the frenetic spontaneity of Basquiat’s early years as a graffiti artist embellishing the streets and subway walls of Lower Manhattan. As our eye jumps restlessly around the composition from one fluid passage to the next, Basquiat’s innate compositional facility and natural colourist sensibility claim back the canvas in superimposed planes of bold colour that fuse the abstract and figurative realms. Basquiat’s colours and gestures exude an urban, intuitive swiftness and energy. Vibrant and omnivorous, like giant subway posters overlapping one another, disparate colours, forms and words flock together with a sense of spontaneous rapport and ongoing pictorial evolution. Reducing both form and subject matter to signs, in their extreme fragmentation, Basquiat achieves a novel kind of de-formalization which owes more to a process of subtraction than accretion.

Basquiat’s confusion about his identity was founded upon a sense of displacement away from his cultural roots, and prompted his lifelong fascination with Africa and tribal art. Central to this was a book titled African Rock Art by Burchard Brentjes which became as important to Basquiat’s graffiti vocabulary as Leonardo da Vinci’s book of drawings had been for his anatomical studies. The pictures and drawings in Brentjes’ book appealed to Basquiat for their African locale and for their primitive, unschooled nature to which he could directly relate. Importantly it located rock art as the primitive ancestor of modern day graffiti and the book provided Basquiat with a constant source of reference and inspiration. In the present composition, the crescent yellow boat in the central panel is a direct appropriation from African rock art and refers to the sickle-shaped boat used by the ancient Egyptians. “Basquiat has identified the boat in the [painting with the word SICKLE – as an act of labelling, as a reference to the life and migration of ancient Africa, to the tool of manual labour, and to the sickel-cell anaemia which affects contemporary blacks." (Richard D. Marshall in Enrico Navarra et al, Jean Michel Basquiat, Paris, 2000, p.41) 

Going from left to right, within abstract dispersion of superimposed and negated forms, Basquiat provides a symbolic El Gran Espectaculo (History of Black People). The two African masks refer to the primitive beginnings of man and art. With their hollow eye sockets and bared teeth, they provide an allusion to death and to their ritualistic, burial function in Voodoo lore. The iconography progresses to that of ancient Egypt in the middle panel, represented through primitive hieroglyphic signs, silhouetted Egyptian figures and the sickle boat mentioned above. Hieroglyphics intrigued Basquiat for their communicative yet inherently abstract form, and he frequently used them in his paintings for their graffiti origins, visual delight and ability to enrich the subject and meaning of his work. The civilization of ancient Egypt symbolised for Basquiat the illustrious heritage of Black people and a golden age of achievement. The sickle boat however, poised and ready to ‘strike’ at the goddess-like figure above it carries us through the right hand panel where contemporary themes of racist subjugation dominate. Rendered through a process of subtraction, these momentary, shapeless forms seem to be swallowed up by the engulfing violence of Basquiat’s brushwork.

The layered complexity and fluidity of association inherent to Basquiat’s technique embodies the disorder, irrationality and precariousness of existence. In El Gran Espectaculo (History of Black People) Basquiat’s disarmingly complex vocabulary of forms, words and ideas tackle the contemporary issues most important to him, renouncing the dangers of modern living head-on. Unlike his Modernist predecessors who sought to resolve contemporary dilemmas through rational analysis, Basquiat tears into them with a spontaneous patchwork of colour and form that expresses the fear and urgency which permeates life. Through direct references, word and non-mimetic signs, race, life, death and equality are intertwined, fusing to embody the anxiety of the modern consciousness and the struggle for survival. As insolent ingenuity is met with inspired compositional intuition, each crucial gesture is inscribed with intensity and certainty. As the present work emphatically conveys, Basquiat is amongst the greatest and most provocative modern masters of our time. “The vocabulary of painting that he has introduced to us is as authentic as Picasso’s. The creative energy, the action packed language of painting, and the vast body of great work he has left us are a treasure of the art of our time.” (Tony Shafrazi, quoted in Enrico Navarra et al, Jean Michel Basquiat, Paris, 2000, p. 50)