Jean-Michel Basquiat

Vrej Bahoomian Inc., New York
Private Collection, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above

In the mercurial oeuvre of Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1982 represents a breakthrough year. Under New York gallerist Annina Nosei, Basquiat secured his first solo exhibition in the United States as well as a stable place to live and work in the basement of her premises. Thereafter approached by eminent European dealer Bruno Bischofberger, Basquiat's career became truly international. Signaling the artist's meteoric rise to prominence within the New York art scene at the age of just twenty-two, the emergent paintings of this early period are among the most experimental, energetic and critically acclaimed of the artist's prolific yet tragically truncated production. Executed towards the close of this remarkable year, Rape of the Roman Torsos commands a diagrammatically spontaneous yet assured compositional schema, testament to the confidence instilled by Basquiat's early critical success. A tripartite composition in both color and form, composed of three vertical canvases and delineated in an imposing schema of black, red and white, the present work stands as an exemplar of the artist's magnificent and unrivalled pictorial aesthetic, consummately reinforcing Basquiat's reputation as one of the most innovative and pioneering artistic voices of the late 20^th Century. 

The works created during these early years of intense creativity are characterized by a keen sense of aesthetic and pictorial cultural synthesis. Redolent of an astutely intellectual and complex semiotic schema, Basquiat wields a powerful cultural vernacular. Informed by his own multi-lingual and tripartite racial identity as a Haitian and Hispanic African-American, Basquiat's mixed heritage instilled his art with a rebellious and nomadic freedom.

Via myriad allusions to his singular cultural inheritance passed through the prism of art history, Basquiat masterfully scrutinizes the aesthetic language of Modernism from a unique racial vantage point. Fused with the graffiti style which first brought him the attention of the New York art scene, Basquiat's wholly inimitable symbolism is enmeshed in a complex matrix of signifiers steeped in indigenous and ancient artistic traditions of African tribal art and channeled through the influence of Picasso, Twombly and Abstract Expressionist masters. Self-taught and formatively nourished by countless childhood visits to the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, the archaeological excavation of Basquiat's multifaceted visual lexicon reveals a voluminous integration of art history's wider topography.  Distinctly evocative of this encyclopedic and mercurial relationship with the history of art, Rape of the Roman Torsos embodies a distinctive and commanding essay on the reductive referential power of Basquiat's commanding orchestration of culturally loaded sign and symbol.

Within the title of the present work Basquiat calls forth a fundamental allusion to a sexually violent art historical archetype of classical mythology. Pervasive in ancient culture and canonical in Renaissance and Neo-Classical art, the dramatic trope of rape litters the oeuvre of pre-eminent masters of art history. Such works as The Rape of the Sabine Women and The Rape of Lucretia by the paradigmatic artists Jacques-Louis David, Rubens, Titian and Poussin constitute a survey of such virile classical violence – a subject taken up by Picasso numerous times between 1962 and 1963. Symbolic of transformation and change in classical myth, the institutionalized trope of sexual brutality appropriated by Basquiat's title is articulated and transmuted through a cacophonous matrix of phallically suggestive body parts, drips and frenzied draftsmanship.  By bestowing his painting with a title that recalls the grand genre of history painting and the paradigmatic beau idéal of classical beauty –since the Renaissance the apogee of which was widely considered to be the Belvedere Torso now housed in the Vatican – Basquiat deconstructs and reformulates an art historical archetype through his unique pictorial composite of graffiti, painting and collage.  Underscored by an authoritative and architectural command of color, Basquiat forges a racial allusion to a united Africa, the black and red insignia of which is most commonly used by the South African Zabalaza Anarchist Communist Federation.  Thus culturally and historically multifarious, Basquiat's vertiginous composition fragments and rearranges such classical paragons to confer an aggressive and dramatic pictorial schema. In an interview with Henry Geldzahler in 1983 when asked if there is anger in his work Basquiat tellingly responded "It's about 80% anger" to which Geldzahler replied "but there's also humor." (Interview cited in Henry Geldzahler, 'Art: From Subways to Soho Jean-Michel Basquiat,' (Exh. Cat. Lugano, Museo d'Arte Moderna, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 2005, p. 48). Indeed, belying any ostensible aggression is a spontaneous playfulness inherent within the artist's graffiti and cartoonish aesthetic that courses through the very best of Basquiat's work.

As is consistent with the artist's overall oeuvre, the meaning of Rape of the Roman Torsos is left intentionally ambiguous; in seeking to challenge the viewer, the work elicits myriad interpretations and conclusions. Evincing a compositional economy and clarity that would not emerge until the artist's later work, the present painting acts as a cipher riddled with complex historical and cultural allusions, magnificently conveying the semiotically nomadic vision inimitable to Basquiat's canon. As incisively articulated by Tony Shafrazi, "Basquiat's encyclopedic imagination couldn't help but gather and include the thousands of sensory impressions he experienced everyday – from the cartoons of his childhood comic books, to the cataloguing of black history derived from his voluminous reading. He voraciously consumed signs and symbols and recast them into his own gnostic code with blazing speed." (Exh. Cat., New York, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1999, p. 12).