Jean-Michel Basquiat

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by the Authentication Committee of the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat

"Basquiat, like Rauschenberg and Warhol, his brothers in canvas-bound iconoclasm, made paintings that were unrepentantly about American culture."

Greg Tate, ‘Nobody Loves a Genius Child: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Flyboy in the Buttermilk’ in: Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Notebooks, New York 1993, p.47

Porter from 1984 is a mature masterpiece addressing the artist’s three primary concerns of race, class and identity; issues which lay at the troubled depths of his own consciousness and that inspired his best autobiographical work. Executed at the height of Basquiat’s creative powers during a period that brought him widespread public as well as critical recognition, Porter is a testament to the young artist’s superlative ability to translate personal experiences of his own life into electrically-charged, symbolic compositions capable of absorbing, reflecting and challenging the viewer’s own sense of identity. Set against a minimalist backdrop of country club green and white, a single black figure dominates the composition assuming an upright poise in a position of duty or service. With one hand tucked behind his back and the other holding an oversized pitcher of water, the dramatic contrast of the subject’s dark skin (only exposed at his head) against the stark white background and starched white uniform immediately draws attention to his African race and his role as a porter or servant.

Born in Brooklyn in 1960 to a Haitian father and a New York Puerto Rican mother, from an early age Basquiat’s mixed heritage instilled in him the mentality of an outsider and with it a concurrent rebellious freedom. He grew up speaking English, Spanish and French and remembered as a child being taken by his mother on visits to the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. He later spoke of these outings and how he recalls rarely, if ever, seeing any depictions of black people in paintings. As a black artist functioning in a white dominated art world, his art became a voice as well as a means for self discovery, and although he rarely ventured into the realm of the overtly political, the subject of racial (in)equality became a natural focus of his creative vision.

The use of individual personalities or occupations like the Porter as a vehicle for tackling the broader concerns of racial inequality and identity is a technique that Basquiat had employed from the very start and one which formed the foundations of his second show at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles in March 1983. There he exhibited a group of works focusing on the status and role of the African American in society with titles like Horn Player, Jack Johnson, Big Shoes and Hollywood Africans; works that took as their subject the names and faces of famous black sportsmen, musicians and celebrities whom Basquiat admired. These complex and pseudo-autobiographical paintings form one of the most important series within Basquiat’s oeuvre performing both as homage to their licentious influence over the young underdog artist as well as cloaked critiques on the underlying stereotypes of society.

Despite being self taught, Basquiat was a keen student of art history and the works he made during these years of intense creativity are characterised by a keen sense of aesthetic as well as personal development. In the previous year alone he had shown his work in 17 group exhibitions, had 4 major solo exhibitions in America, Europe and Japan, and becoming the youngest artist to ever be included in the prestigious Whitney Biennial. The creative confidence that this success gave him resulted in a newfound clarity of purpose and execution. This is reflected here in the bold and balanced composition that significantly moves away from the all over freneticism of his earlier work towards a more carefully chosen formula of words, symbols and images. Rather than robbing the composition of its meaning, this act of reduction positively enriches its poetic capacity giving it both greater focus as well as enhancing its intended narrative ambiguity.

Although the title Porter makes direct reference to the subject depicted, Basquiat rarely used literal titles or titles which related directly to his work - most often, he used jumbles of words which have to be decoded in order to grasp the true concept of his art like a psychological jigsaw puzzle. The present work shares many of the attributes one finds in works openly designated as self-portraits. There is a sense of the artist’s own inner conflict here; one side of his complex character at odds with another.  It is unclear whether or not the present work is a self-portrait, yet the issue of race and stature constantly addressed throughout his oeuvre are inherently present in this compelling image. Emotionally charged and allegorically rich, it provides an authentic and complex commentary on many of the pertinent issues he perceived within contemporary American society.