Jean-Michel Basquiat

Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Zurich

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2010

Zurich, Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Jean-Michel Basquiat, September - October 1983 

Bonn, Bundeskunsthalle, Ménage à trois: Warhol, Basquiat, Clemente, February - May 2012, p. 194, no. 15, illustrated in colour 

Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario; and Bilbao, Guggenheim Museum, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now’s the Time, February - November 2015, p. 71, illustrated in colour (Toronto); and p. 73, illustrated in colour (Bilbao)

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate although the paper tone is slightly darker in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The sheet is attached verso the backing mount in several places. The edges of the sheet are deckled. This work is in very good condition. The paper exhibits signs of original studio wear including a few creases and media accretions in places.
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Forged in a fury of idiosyncratic oilstick, Wire at once demonstrates the skill of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s draughtsmanship and the immense scope of his influence. The diagrammatic impact of Gray’s Anatomy – a scientific textbook that the artist had been familiar with since childhood – is palpably felt, as is the artist’s formative engagement with graffiti culture and his scholarly handle of art-historical precedent. Through this work, we are truly aware of Basquiat as “the Pan-American Native Son, the child of Haitian and Puerto Rican parents whose ecumenical ear and eye seem to have been tuned to multiple registers from an early age, someone who, with spongelike alacrity, absorbed everything around him” (Henry Louis Gates Jr., ‘Sweet Bird of Youth’, in: Exh. Cat., New York, The Brooklyn Museum, Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks, 2015, p. 20).

By the time Wire was created in 1983, Gray’s Anatomy had been present in Basquiat’s life for nearly twenty years. Aged seven, Basquiat had his spleen surgically removed after a serious car accident. In order to explain the injury, and to entertain him during his lengthy hospital stay, Basquiat’s mother gave him the anatomical textbook as a present. He was captivated immediately and his fixation on the archetypal diagrams and illustrations was enduring, eventually acting as the source material for countless masterpieces and even providing the name for his avant-garde noise-band Gray, which produced John Cage-inspired experimental tracks in the early 1980s. The influence of this scientific tome is keenly felt throughout the figure shown in the present work: in the sternum and ribs, which appear as an inverted pyramid of instinctive hatchings; in the guts, reduced to simply labelled shapes; in the knees, where the joints are abstracted into graphic swirls and loops; and in the mouth, where, in an onomatopoeic fusion between form and content, Basquiat inscribes the lower jaw with the word “T E E T H” in block capitals, spikily spelled out to suggest the snag of canines and molars. The influence of Gray’s Anatomy upon this work shows the manner in which this artist relied upon source material and creative stimulus; not as examples to imitate, but rather as points of departure – starting blocks from whence his unbridled depictive fluency could run.

This work is also important as an example of how text was just as important as image in Basquiat’s work, and of how the two were deployed in symbiosis. Indeed, having started his career as a graffiti writer under the pseudonym SAMO, it is easy to argue that, for Basquiat, text took precedence. His creative consciousness was honed scrawling isolated phrases on SoHo walls and subway cars and it was in this arena that he first achieved notoriety. In the present work, we not only witness the anatomical annotations of stomach, liver, and scapula, but can also discern an isolated phrase – “KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF THAT WIRE” – which is a direct quote, replete with speech marks, from White Heat, a 1949 gangster classic starring James Cagney.

This use of isolated text, deployed without context, explanation or illustration, moves us to think of Basquiat’s reverence for one of his artistic heroes – Cy Twombly. Just like Basquiat, whose city was New York, Twombly absorbed influence from an eclectic array of stimuli principally gleaned from the culture of Rome. Both Basquiat and Twombly created oeuvres that defy categorisation according to genre, and both executed their works in the same manner: with raw frenetic abandon, juxtaposing abstract passages with isolated figurative moments and snatches of text. Even at this early stage of his career, Basquiat was fluently toying with the precedent of modern masters such as Twombly, and indeed, was qualified to do so. During the year before this work was created, he had become the youngest ever artist privileged with an invitation to exhibit in documenta, where he showed alongside Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, and two of his art historical heroes: Andy Warhol and Cy Twombly. Thus, in this work we understand Basquiat as established – no longer the precocious outsider. His confidence in his own abilities is abundant not only in the surety of his draughtsmanship, but also in the ease with which he assimilates influence from classic cinema, anatomical drawings, and art history, into his inimitable and instinctive style.