Jean-Michel Basquiat

Maeght-Lelong Gallery, New York
Vrej Baghoomian, New York
Gallery Sho, Tokyo
Galerie Enrico Navarra, Paris
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Paris, Fondation Cartier, Comme un oiseau, 1996
Kaohsiung, Museum of Fine Arts; Taichung, Taichung Museum, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1997, p. 76
Seoul, Gallery Hyundai, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1997, p. 66, illustrated
Tokyo, Mitsukoshi Museum; Marugame, M.I.M.O.C.A., Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1997, p. 83
Sao Paulo, Pinacoteca, Jean-Michel Basquiat - Pinturas, 1998, p. 83
Venice, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Basquiat a Venezia, 1999, p. 99
Naples, Museo Civico Castel Nuovo, Jean-Michel Basquiat a Napoli, 1999, p. 107, illustrated in colour
Paris, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Histoire d'une oeuvre, 2003, p. 103, illustrated in colour, and on the cover

Richard Marshall, Enrico Navarra and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris 1996, vol. 1, p. 323, illustrated in colour
Tony Shafrazi et al., Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York 1999, p. 246, illustrated in colour
Richard Marshall, Enrico Navarra and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris 2000, Vol. I, p. 309, illustrated in colour; Vol. II, p. 232, illustrated in colour

"Since I was seventeen, I thought I might be a star. I'd think about all my heroes: Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix... I had a romantic feeling of how people had become famous." — Jean-Michel Basquiat

Heaven is one of Jean-Michel Basquait’s most profound and poetic compositions, offering a deeply touching momento mori to one of the artist’s childhood heroes, the legendary Jazz saxophonist Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker. It is one of his most original and authoritative mature works. Gathering together the primal concerns of race, identity and death that drove his creative urge, word, form and composition are united and distilled to their most fundamental and austere articulation.

Acutely aware of his own mortality having been run over and nearly killed as a young child, throughout his career, he employed many direct as well as symbolic means to express his fascination with it. Of all these, none perhaps are more ironically prescient than the figure of Charlie Parker who had died tragically young and with whom Basquiat associated so closely.  Whilst ‘Dead Bird’ and the stylised ‘Bird of Paradise’ flower both refer to the death of Parker, the stark juxtaposition of Basquiat’s ‘auto portrait’ alongside them on this ‘blood-spattered’, tomb-stone like composition prophetically suggests that he will be joining his hero in ‘Heaven’ soon.

As well as revealing the demons that haunted Basquiat’s troubled identity, Heaven communicates his obsessive fascination with contemporary icons and their capacity to personify the ills and injustices he perceived in modern American society. In the persona of Charlie Parker, Basquiat found the ultimate motif: a figure with whom he could associate creatively as well as personally, and a means of uniting the two underlying themes of his work - race and death. A champion of improvisation who had gathered bits of melody from every direction and united them in an eccentric, individual rhythm, Parker’s life and work were a source of great inspiration for Basquiat during his formative teenage years. Coming from an underprivileged African American background similar to his own, he also felt a close personal affinity to the ‘Bird’ because of the many similarities in their histories.

Perhaps most importantly, Parker provided Basquiat with a means of voicing his concerns over racial issues and inequality. Painfully aware of the odds stacked against him as an African American in a white dominated art world, he looked to the successful African American sports and music stars of his childhood for inspiration. As well as acknowledging the motivational strength they had given him, the recurring figures of Charlie Parker, Sugar Ray Robinson and Cassius Clay gave a politically acceptable outlet through which Basquiat could express his beliefs on racial inequality in American society.

By 1985, Basquiat was no longer the enfant terrible whose urban energy had rocked the foundations of the New York art scene but was instead being trumpeted as their leading light. With solo exhibitions in the best galleries around the world and unlimited studio resources at his disposal, now at the veritable height of his career, he turned his back on the world which had embraced him as its prodigal son and returned to working with renewed intuition using whatever materials he could find. Taking a wooden door and unleashing upon it a spontaneous explosion of existential fury with his hands and feet, the frenetic, all-over matrix of his large canvases is here refined into the sentimental application of a few vital gestures. In doing so he reclaims the elementary spontaneity of his earliest works and their fundamental pictorial relationships to elevate his fusion of form and material to unprecedented heights. Encroaching into the viewer’s own space through its sculptural depth, the first-hand immediacy of the rough-hewn composition harks back to the poster-strewn subway walls and downtown streets of New York which had presented Basquiat with his first ‘readymade’ canvas. Although the rawness and violence of this approach to painting embodies the naïve intuition of the untrained in a way which Jean Dubuffet could never have imagined, Basquiat in fact immersed himself in the work of the artists he most admired, and gathered from their licentious example new means of expression. Most obviously here, the very real physical presence of the door points to his great admiration for Robert Rauschenberg and his Combines which had paved the way for Basquiat’s own organic style of symbolic expression. The influence of Mark Rothko too can be observed in Basquiat’s layering of the composition through floating blocks of superimposed colour.

However, unlike Rauschenberg’s carefully composed constructions and Rothko’s delicate layering of paint, Heaven is assertively spontaneous in its evolution. Each, raw gesture provides an impulsive response to the one which preceded it whilst shaping the form and meaning of those which follow.  In a departure from the preceding years which had seen Basquiat loading his canvases with a sometimes overwhelming panorama of forms and motifs, here he restricts himself to only a handful. Each is carefully-chosen, heavily-impregnated with allegorical as well as profound personal meaning. Within every element is the theme which unites all of his most powerful mature works - the fear of death.

Basquiat, like Parker, was an exceptionally creative individual talent for whom convention and rule existed to be broken and in an insightful observation, jazz historian Leonard Feather commented: “although Parker had little formal training, he was a man of amazing technical skill, a fast reader and a gifted composer-arranger… he brought the art of improvisation to a new peak of maturity… his work set a new standard on every level; harmonic, tonal, rhythmic and melodic.” The same might be said of Basquiat’s improvised free style of painting, which attains a lyrical power here to rival the most soulful of Parker’s compositions.