Jean-Michel Basquiat

Gringo Pilot (Anola Gay) is an early venture into the richness of Basquiat’s continuously evolving vocabulary, which offers a rare insight into the mind of one of the 20^th century’s most acclaimed, though notoriously troubled and tormented artists. Executed during the first year of his growing public and critical recognition, the present work is a testament to the young artist’s superlative ability to reproduce the abstract and figural experiences of his short life in an electrically-charged body of work. Seeking to remove the constraints imposed on creativity by society and traditional principles governing art, Basquiat practiced a stream of consciousness technique from head to hand, whose liberating effects are powerfully conveyed in Gringo Pilot (Anola Gay) through the juxtaposed variety and spontaneous energy of his drawing.  A monumental work on paper, Gringo Pilot (Anola Gay) is like a mural loaded with a dense network of ideas, dazzling in both its execution as a drawing and as a vehicle for the many tributaries of thought that inform Basquiat’s process.

Basquiat was a prolific draftsman and his studio was littered with his sketches and notebooks, as the artist seemingly tried to exorcise the demons within. Basquiat made endless frantic and explosively expressive drawings, which served as a lexicon for his fresh and entirely unique iconography.  The early drawings of 1981 and 1982 were used and reused as constant reference points, and their raw spontaneity was a visual resource for Basquiat’s works on canvas. Yet in Gringo Pilot (Anola Gay), Basquiat has executed a work on paper in the scale of a monumental canvas, announcing this work as a fully mature creation on its own merits.

Layering diverse words among dislocated heads, floating crowns, a baseball, a motor car, and other more pictographic forms, Basquiat intuitively builds the composition through the imposition of phrases and forms, creating allusions and meanings through his ‘mixing’ of words and imagery in much the same way as the DJ mixes records.

Certainly, Basquiat layered his canvases with isolated and dislocated texts or letters or codified marks that enriched the Index of the pictorial Image. In this drawing, the ebb and flow of Text and Image which marks the very best examples of Basquiat’s complex enterprise is equally evident.

The various elements of Gringo Pilot (Anola Gay) are given meaning and structure by the artist’s sinuous, meandering line that seems to form meaning and narrative before our very eyes. The signature example of the floating head recalls the primitive figuration of Art Brut and the work of Jean Dubuffet, as well as tribal masks. Skulls pepper Basquiat’s early production, both painted and drawn, and for the artist this motif was extremely critical to his personal vocabulary, just as cars and crowns recur throughout his oeuvre. The artist was fully aware of the extant meanings associated with the skull, as a sign of Vanitas or the contemplation of one’s mortality. Basquiat’s skulls are of course images of himself, referencing his mixed Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage and his own concerns about the status and role of the black man in society.  Basquiat was eternally conscious of his black identity within a white dominated art-world, and although he never strayed into the realm of the overtly political, the subject of racial (in)equality became an unequivocal focus of his creative vision.  In the present work, subtle references to black cultural life are present in the repetition of the word ``boxing’’ in the structure with the crown in the lower right, as well as the baseball with a crown in the center of the image.  But the title is the artist’s most direct confrontation with the racial theme in the present work.  Paul Tibbets was the pilot of the Enola Gay, the infamous B-52 bomber (named after his mother) that dropped the atomic bombs over Japan in August 1945.  The Enola Gay and its pilot are ideal symbols of the dual nature of America - achievement and heroism versus destruction and brutality – and Basquiat’s title of ``Gringo Pilot’’ makes tacit reference to the ``ugly’’ side of white America.