Jean-Michel Basquiat

Maria Duval, New York
Joe La Placa, New York
Baron/ Boisanté Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Japan
Galerie Andrea Caratsch, Zurich

This work is in excellent condition. The sheet is mounted at intervals to a paperboard mount. As to be expected with the artist's method, there are rub marks, traces of footprints and accretions scattered to the sheet overall, and a 2 by 1½ in. paper accretion towards the center of the left edge, which are all inherent to the work's execution. The edges are deckled, with some associated very minor creases, notches and lifting, especially to the top and bottom edges, which again appear inherent to the work's execution. There is a short ½ in. tear to the bottom edge, 4½ in. from the bottom left corner and one ⅛ in. that is 11 in. from the bottom left corner. There is a very thin, faint and intermittent vertical line of discoloration ¼ in. next to the right edge. The work is framed in a white painted wood frame under Plexiglas.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

“Drawing, for him [Basquiat], was something you did rather than something done, an activity rather than a medium. The seemingly throw-away sheets that carpeted his studio might appear little more than warm-ups for painting, except that the artist, a shrewd connoisseur of his own off-hand and under foot inventions did not in fact throw them away, but instead kept the best for constant reference and re-use. Or, kept them because they were, quite simply, indestructibly vivid.”

Robert Storr, “Two Hundred Beats Per Min,” in Exh. Cat., New York, The Robert Miller Gallery, Basquiat Drawings, 1990, n.p.

 

With his flashing gritted bare teeth, hyperbolic blue eyes, dense spiked hair and accompanying double sketches of a similar commanding presence, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s portrait subject, John Lurie, faces the viewer replete with irresistible charm, ocular kinetics and profound musicality. Executed in 1982 and entitled John Lurie, after the acclaimed painter and musician, this disarmingly simple yet utterly dynamic drawing of a downtown star bears witness to Basquiat’s meteoric rise as an Olympus of the New York art scene. It also bears witness to the friendship between the artist and his subject, in whose apartment Basquiat would stay from time to time.  One year after his first exhibition at the Annina Nosei Gallery in 1981, Basquiat was in transition from his nomadic graffitist identity to a major studio artist; however he continued working on simple mediums such as paper, since its economy of means afforded the kind of facility in manual execution and unadulterated spontaneity that the artist carried throughout his entire creative career.

Basquiat was a prolific draftsman and made endless frantic and explosively expressive drawings, which served as a lexicon for his fresh and entirely unique iconography. His early drawings were used and reused as constant reference points, and their raw vivacity provided many a visual resource for Basquiat’s works on canvas. Crudely delineated, with loose and muscular strokes of black, brown and red oilstick, the heads of John Lurie seem to be dancing across the tableau. The line from the eye of the top-right figure flows downward to form the hair of the lower-right figure; then his shoulder-line meanders across the picture plane to form the neck of the central figure. Careless with their energy, the lines are never careless with their narrative – perhaps elaborating a heated conversation between different aspects of John Lurie’s personality. There’s no perspectival logic to the composition: oilstick marks show the implosion of form into pure energy, sometimes quiet, sometimes furious and always poetic. As a consequence, the drawing, more effectively than his paintings, demonstrates that there is an equivalence of line, color, image and mark that remains so unique to the artist’s oeuvre.

Unleashing explosive disjunctions of oilstick and sporadic touches of red highlights and blue shadows that delineate Lurie’s face, Basquiat builds an intuitive visual language with startling visual syncopation which Robert Storr calls a sort of “eye-rap”.  The effect is aptly poignant especially considering the subject of the portrait is a renowned musician. John Lurie has been a significant and prolific member of the New Yorkdowntown art and cultural scene since the 1970s. His jazz-punk band The Lounge Lizards were at the forefront of the late-1970s New York ‘No-wave’ music scene. He starred in Jim Jarmusch’s pioneering independent films Stranger Than Paradise and Down by Law, along with hosting a TV cult favorite, Fishing With John. His Down by Law co-star, Roberto Benigni, described him in fractured English as “a very big actor and musicist that in the world everybody know… between Ray Charles and Brigitte Bardot.” (Ibid.)  Accented by abrupt patches of silence on the minimally prepared paper ground, between interlocking shapes and crisp tonal harmonies, John Lurie’s figure emerges as a musical presence with the same rhythmic structure as his music. Basquiat did not lay lines or colors on a compositional ground; like a musician, he weaved together a succession of themes into an overall rhythm, a jazz score with a scorching saxophone solo in the center.

In the film Downtown 81 (1981, directed by Glenn O’Brien), in which John Lurie also had a cameo appearance, Basquiat is seen spraying paint or casually scribbling on all kinds of surfaces, attesting to his boundless creativity and more importantly to the ease with which he mingled with the high and the low, the mythic and the quotidian.  From very early on, Basquiat’s terse aesthetics and fundamental confidence in the eidetic impact of his mark-making was never in question. An exciting example of Basquiat’s early mature work, John Lurie effectively informs the artist’s extraordinary means of expression, revealing his improvisational drawings to be a complex and ambitious attempt to invent a new language for himself and to inaugurate a new breakthrough in American artistic landscape.