Jean-Michel Basquiat

Mary Boone Gallery, New York
Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zürich
Heiner Bastian, Berlin
Private Collection, Berlin

Colours: The colours are fairly accurate in the catalogue illustration, although the overall tonality is more vibrant in the original with the dark green-grey areas tending more towards battleship grey; the pale grey areas towards cement grey; the blue of the globe towards aquamarine, and the dark green in the white painted area of the bottom right hand corner more towards gold. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are two very light handling marks to the centre and upper centre of the right hand vertical edge. There is wear with associated loses to the bottom left and top left corners on the overturn edge, and a further spot of wear to the tip of the bottom right corner. There is a very small rub mark to the bottom edge towards the left hand corner and one towards the centre of the bottom edge of the globe. There is a small pressure mark to the bottom left hand corner. There is a tiny, isolated hairline crack above the bright green paint in the lower centre of the composition. There is a network of very fine and stable drying craquelure running between the centre of the left edge to the top edge of the globe. There is also a small circular pressure mark with associated drying craquelure to the lower centre of the globe. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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From an early age, Jean-Michel Basquiat was painfully aware of his mixed raced Puerto Rican / African American heritage and it instilled him a desire to express through art the various contradictory influences he perceived within his upbringing and identity. Created at the height of his artistic maturity when he was just twenty three years old, At Large is one Basquiat's greatest autobiographical masterpieces. Formerly in the collection of Heiner Bastian, it lucidly reveals the troubled identity that Basquiat felt as an African American artist in New York, and can be interpreted as a metaphorical map retracing the origins of his confused multifaceted personality.

There is a mature sense of clarity to the composition that marks the increasing confidence in the young artist's vision as he looked to condense the all over frenetic layering of his earlier compositions into fewer, more poetically suggestive and symbolically loaded motifs. The centrally floating globe that dominates the composition is surrounded by continental fragments of text and image that float within a thick grey sea like scattered islands nearly submerged by flood. Evenly dispersed, they provide bold glimpses of countless vibrant under layers beneath and offer clues into the canvas's intuitive, stream-of-consciousness genesis. The heavily worked surface itself exudes the same sense of existential urgency that had characterised his earliest works, and narrates a course of spontaneous evolution through numerous stages of word and image, form and colour before arriving together in a final, cumulative crescendo. The tangible energy of Basquiat's untrained brushwork is legitimized by the sense of revelation and history it contains. It transmits a feeling of truthful expression comparable to Cy Twombly's style of lyrical 'handwriting'.

Like with all Basquiat's best work, the meaning of At Large is left intentionally ambiguous. It seeks to challenge the viewer into drawing their own conclusions by deconstructing the composition in a kind of archaeological examination. Here the artist actively encourages this by forcing visual alliances between the brightly coloured areas framed in bold isolation like countries delineated by national flags. This is embodied by the continent on the blue central globe, which whilst occupying the central position usually associated with Africa, has a shape resembling that of Northern America. The red and white striped American flag and the laughing white face to the left encourage this association further, whilst the headless figure in the lower right reflects the more primitive aesthetic influences of African tribal art. Combining high art and low art influences through an urban, raw immediacy of execution, the expressive power and energy of his paintings remains as potent today as when they first exploded onto New York's art scene in 1980.