Jean-Michel Basquiat

Galleria Mazzoli, Modena
Finarte, Rome, May 10, 1984, lot 93
Private Collection
Private Collection, Italy

Modena, Galleria Civica, Il disegno nelle raccolte private modenesi, December 1993 - January 1994, p. 184, illustrated
Naples, Museo di Castelnuovo; Rome, Chiostro del Bramante; Museu de Arte Contemporanea do Paranà; Belo Horizonte, Fundaçao Clovis Salgado; Mujseo de Arte Moderna Mam Bahia; Museu de Arte Moderna Rio de Janeiro; Istituto Cultural Itaù Sau Paulo, American Graffiti, 1997, p. 61 (Naples) and p. 120 (Rome), illustrated
Rome, Chiostro del Bramante, Jean Michel Basquiat, January - March 2002, p. 69, illustrated
Cosenza, Chiostro di Santa Chiara, La vera Pandora di tutte le virtù celesti, December 2008 - January 2009, p. 26, illustrated
Rome, Villa Doria Pamphilj, Potere inconscio e creatività: Lo stato delle cose, June 2010, illustrated
XLIII Premio Vasto, Memoria e creatività: I mille occhi della Sfinge, July - November 2010, p. 29, illustrated

Gianni Mercurio, Basquiat, Florence, 2006, cat. no. 227, p. 20, illustrated

This work is in very good condition overall. The edges of the paper show evidence of light wear and handling. When unframed, one can see evidence of a previous mounting with a few holes along the edges of the paper. There are two pinholes that have torn the sheet very slightly, one at the top center and one along the left side in the center, both of which appear to be from the time of execution. There are original charcoal and pastel smudges, presumably a result of the artist's working method and the studio environment. There is a three quarter inch tear at the bottom center and a quarter inch tear at the upper right. There is a spot on the bottom left where part of the top layer of paper has lifted slightly. The colors are bright fresh and clean. The sheet may have discolored slightly with age. The sheet is hinged verso to the matte along the top edge. Framed under glass.
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.
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In the highly energetic and ground-breaking, yet tragically brief, painting career of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled from 1981 marks a central point. Only a year 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 1981, Basquiat’s distinctive style became more confident and recognizable, and that same year he joined the Annina Nosei Gallery and mounted his first one-man show in March 1981 to great acclaim. 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.

Untitled from 1981 shares many visual elements displayed heretofore in Basquiat’s work, such as vibrant colors and the graphic, paired down representational quality of the central subject matter. The work 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, Untitled is also a deeply meaningful rumination on the profound relationship of Basquiat’s life to the subject matter of his oeuvre, focusing particularly on the image of the automobile that appears as an element in so many of the artist’s works.

The present work 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. 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.

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 Untitled, 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. The image of the car is fully rendered, rather than quickly sketched, making this work unique amongst the representations of automobiles in Basquiat’s oeuvre.

Untitled from 1981 recalls Andy Warhol’s car crash images from his 1960s Death and Disaster series, demonstrating Basquiat’s fascination with the established Pop master and heralding the close professional and personal relationship between the two artists, later resulting in a series of collaborative works. Yet for all the affinity between their co-opting of cultural symbols from everyday life, the present work 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 Untitled, 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.