Jean-Michel Basquiat

Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in June 1996

Paris, Galeries Lucien Durand-Enrico Navarra, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Works on Paper, 1996, pp. 98-99

Bernard Blistene, Robert Farris Thompson, Richard Marshall and Elena Ochoa, eds., Jean-Michel Basquiat: Works on Paper, Paris, 1999, pp. 314-315, illustrated in color

This work is in very good condition overall. All four edges are deckled. The top left and bottom right corners are slightly torn, and there is some minor paint loss at these corners and intermittently along the edges. There is a 1 1/4 inch long tear at the top left of the sheet. All variations to the paint and paper collage appear to be inherent to the artist's working method. The sheet is hinged verso to the matte intermittently along the edges. Framed under Plexiglas.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat’s powerful, jarring and sometimes controversial canvases draw heavily on Afrocentric themes mixed with graffiti based on his own Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage.  His conflation of archetypal motifs and extraordinary cultural critique swiftly propelled Basquiat to international acclaim during the early 1980s. Through synthesizing graffiti, primitivism and abstract expressionism, Basquiat presents a powerful racial dialectic in his postmodern world centered by the artist’s own identity as a multi-racial and ethnically plural individual at the very forefront of an emergent avant-garde.

In Five Cents, Basquiat remains consistent with his art historical canon employing recast, cut-up and remixed visual idioms to give form to an entirely new language.  This work on paper includes the repetition of the phrases “MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY” (depicted four times with a crown atop the text) as well as “FIVE CENTS” (the work’s title, which is written three times, twice with the words “three hundred dollars” above).  Basquiat often depicted subjects of class struggle, oppression and popular culture, not unlike the present work.  Perhaps Five Cents serves as an attack of bourgeois society – particularly Hollywood and racial tensions.  Or maybe it is simply a statement about consumer culture similar to his other “cent” based works.

Five Cents was created in 1987, the year before Basquiat’s tragic death and much after his 1982 banner year (when he created nearly 200 works, opened six solo shows in cities worldwide and became the youngest artist ever to be included in Documenta).  For some critics, Basquiat’s rapid rise to fame – and similarly swift death –epitomizes and personifies the overly commercial, hyped international art scene symptomatic of the larger consumer economic culture – certainly encompassing the ‘motion picture industry.’  Additionally, Basquiat forged a friendship with iconic Pop artist Andy Warhol during the 80s. Warhol, highly esteemed for depictions of how superficialities of popular culture came to govern all aspects of life, died in February of 1987 – the year Five Cents was completed.  Perhaps this loss, and Warhol’s legacy also contributed to the symbolism in the work.