Jean-Michel Basquiat

Gagosian Gallery, New York
Texas Gallery, Houston
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1989

Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, The Private Eye: Selected Works from the Collections of Friends of the Museum of Fine Arts, June - August 1989
Houston, Blaffer Gallery, University of Houston, The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism, June - July 1990

Richard Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris, 1996, 1st ed., vol. II, no. 8, p. 98, illustrated in color
Richard Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris, 1996, 2nd ed., vol. II, no. 8, p. 126, illustrated in color
Richard Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris, 2000, 3rd ed., vol. II, no. 8, p. 200, illustrated in color

This painting is in very good condition. There are no apparent restorations under ultraviolet light. The canvas is not framed.
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In the highly energetic and ground-breaking, yet tragically brief, painting career of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Red Car Rusting in Kuaufrom 1984 marks a central point. Only a few years earlier, 1980 saw the transition that brought Basquiat’s art indoors, as he relinquished the graffiti persona SAMO (an abbreviation for `same old’) and began to embark on the robust production of paintings that continued during the next eight years. By 1984, Basquiat’s distinctive style was firmly established and recognized by the international art world, especially with the artist’s representation by renowned European art dealer Bruno Bischofberger in addition to hisNew York gallerists, particularly Annina Nosei. That same year, Basquiat’s first solo museum show opened atEdinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery, subsequently traveling to other European cities. Thus, the artist’s unabashed incorporation of his distinctive mark-making vocabulary with his ability to construct intuitive and inspired compositions was acclaimed at home and abroad.

Red Car Rusting in Kuau shares many visual elements displayed here-to-fore in Basquiat’s work, such as vibrant colors and the graphic, paired down representational quality of the central subject matter. The canvas is a reverberant mixture of Jean-Michel’s astute handling of color and line, with the same elemental and primitive aura as the Art Brut of Jean Dubuffet’s early works of the 1940s and 1950s. All the while underscored by Basquiat’s exuberant aesthetics, Red Car Rusting in Kuau is also a deeply meaningful rumination on the profound relationship of Basquiat’s life to the subject matter of his paintings, focusing particularly on the image of the automobile that appears as an element in so many of the artist’s works.

Red Car Rusting in Kuau is perhaps one of the most concentrated and fully formed representations of the car as motif in Basquiat’s oeuvre. As a child of nearly eight years old, Basquiat was hit by a car, leading to a broken arm, internal injuries and hospitalization. During his month-long hospital stay, his mother gave young Jean-Michel a copy of Gray’s Anatomy. The anatomical and skeletal imagery therein is a widely noted influence on Basquiat’s later painted works and drawings, replete as they are with often fragmented or diagrammatic representations of the body and textual references to an indexical understanding of its parts (Jean-Michel Basquiat, Galerie Enrico Navarra, Paris, 2000, p. 272).  Thus, the events surrounding the artist’s childhood trauma become deeply connected with the nascent stages of his artistic inspiration as well as to some of the most important visual elements to later emerge in his paintings.

In more general terms, Basquiat was also fascinated by cars, dragsters in particular. In Red Car Rusting in Kuau, the metallic body of the racer burns red hot, the artist revealing the engine under the hood that fuels the machine. As with many of Basquiat’s most powerful works, a juxtaposition of painterly naïveté and aggressive subject mater charges the composition. For the duration of Basquiat’s career, cars appear as lone personae or as groupings in more intricate compositional matrixes. The car is a particularly salient image in Basquiat’s early paintings from 1980 to 1982, rendered mostly as graphic sketches or quickly drawn outlines of the automobile form. In Red Car Rusting in Kuau (1984), the car reappears as the central figure that overwhelms the composition, much in the same way that human heads, torsos and other objects like saxophones and mask-like imagery tend to take center stage in Basquiat’s paintings around the same time. Red Car is fully rendered, rather than quickly sketched, with careful detail given to its interior and body style, making this work unique amongst the representations of automobiles in Basquiat’s oeuvre.

Red Car Rusting in Kuau recalls Andy Warhol’s car crash images from his 1960s Death and Disaster series, and it is around the time Red Car is painted that the relationship between Basquiat and Warhol matured. Beginning in 1983, Basquiat rented his Great Jones Street residence from Warhol and around 1984, the two artists commenced making their collaborative works, spending an increased amount of time together. Yet for all the affinity between their co-opting of cultural symbols from everyday life, Red Car Rusting in Kuau epitomizes the crucial difference between the two artist’s aesthetics. In Warhol’s car crash silkscreens such as Orange Car Crash Fourteen Times from 1963 in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the horrific results of the American male’s fascination with automobiles are rendered in the artist’s typically cool and straightforward style by means of mechanical processes contrasted against the lurid orange ground. While Warhol’s images were taken from the realm of pulp media appeal, Basquiat’s work added his own experience and emotional trauma to other cultural references, all rendered in a painterly verve. Basquiat’s vibrant and intuitively communicative canvases are hallmarks of the unbridled creativity that the young artist brought to New York’s art community in the 1980s. In Red Car Rusting in Kuau, the image of the automobile taps the power embodied in the supercharged machine of the young artist’s imagination and the potent force embodied within the artist himself.