Jean-Michel Basquiat

Mugrabi Collection, New York
Hamiltons Gallery, London
Sale: Sotheby's, New York, Contemporary Art, 9 November 2005, Lot 42
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Tokyo, Akira Ikeda Gallery, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings, 1983, no. 3
Paris, Galerie Enrico Navarra, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1996
Coral Gables, Quintana Gallery, Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1980-1988, 1996-97, p. 11, illustrated in colour
Vienna, Kunsthaus, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings and Works on Paper, 1999, p. 59, illustrated in colour
Milan, Fondazione La Triennale, The Jean-Michel Basquiat Show, 2006-07, no. 87, illustrated in colour

Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris 1996, 1st ed., Vol. I, p. 63, illustrated in colour and Vol. 2, fig. 27, p. 132, illustrated in colour (Akira Ikeda 1983 installation view)
Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris 1996, 2nd ed., Vol. I, p. 87, illustrated in colour and Vol. 2, fig. 27, p. 206, illustrated in colour (Akira Ikeda 1983 installation view) and no. 12, p. 249, illustrated in colour (Galerie Enrico Navarra 1996 installation view)
Toni Shafrazi et al., Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York 1999, p. 98, illustrated in colour
Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris 2000, 3rd ed., Vol. I, p. 83, illustrated in colour and Vol. 2, p. 100, no. 4, illustrated in colour, p. 289, illustrated twice in colour (Akira Ikeda 1983 and Galerie Enrico Navarra 1996 installation views)

 

 

 

Warrior is a dazzling work painted by Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1982, the year in which he reached his full artistic maturity and creative powers. Depicting the combative warrior, the central motif that permeates the artist's entire oeuvre as a quasi-autobiographical thread, the present work is a dense layering of Basquiat's technical, conceptual and polemical energies. Loaded with a complex network of ideas, stunning in both its execution as a painting and as a vehicle for the many tributaries of thought that inform Basquiat's process, Warrior stands out as one of the most energetic of the artist's early works; a bravura piece of painting that leaves the viewer spellbound.

 

In the centre of the picture plane, the raw, violent figure stands poised ready for battle. With his sword unsheathed and raised ready to strike in one hand, he is reminiscent of Renaissance depictions of courtly knights, like Carpaccio's Portrait of a Knight, 1510, where the prominent sword is a symbol of strength and authority. Aggressively staring out of the picture plain with red penetrating eyes, Basquiat's fierce gladiator is crudely yet powerfully delineated with stick-like limbs and a flattened mask-like face. Fascinated by anatomy ever since he was hospitalised as a boy after a car accident, the depiction of the human form here evinces Basquiat's preoccupation with the inner machinations of the body. Seemingly viewed simultaneously externally and in x-ray, the figure's right side is fleshed out while his left side is left as a skeleton. While external features are described, such as the insinuation of dreaded hair, in places the form is entirely skeletal, as in the schematic rendering of the spine and rib cage. Internal organs are also suggested, the torso reading like a distorted diagram from Gray's Anatomy which Basquiat read as a child, the cavernous black space seemingly an indication of internal damage. This interest in the human body spreads to the background, where lattices of lines patch the environment like scars.

 

The face, mask-like in its construction, reveals emaciated, scarified eyes and clenched jaw, hinting at his Haitian heritage and a spiritual, Shaman-like figure. Unequivocally inspired by the Cubism of his great hero Picasso, the figure also looks back to the older artist's own sources in primitive African art, in itself a validation of Basquiat's own cultural heritage. In particular, Basquiat's figure, with the haptic emphasis on the eyes and teeth, bears striking similarities to African tribal figures. In Warrior, the talon-like claws delineating the metatarsals are like the nails hammered into the sacred nkisi nkondi figurines native to the Congo, in which each nail represents an oath, each adding to the talismanic power of the icon. For Picasso, primitivism was an antidote to the conservatism of the academies; similarly Basquiat finds in his own recourse to primitivism a corrective to the chaste intellectual coolness of late modernism and a powerful mode of expressing overtly contemporary angst.

 

The wildly fashioned background with blocks of raw yellows and blues laid down with intense, gestural brushwork, show Basquiat's acute awareness of his position in art history and evoke the abstract compositions of Willem de Kooning in particular. There is no perspectival logic or spatial recession to the composition, rather it is all about surface, colour and expressivity. Meshing figure and ground together, oil stick marks and swathes of paint show the implosion of form into pure energy; just as the figure is built up with dense, muscular strokes of white, blue and dense black oil stick, the artist has etched the oil stick into the background, transferring his energy into depicting the aggressive stance and personality of the Warrior. There is no calm moment within the painting - it is pure, raw, nervous energy with the background an extension of the psyche of the figure and by implication the artist himself. Basquiat often painted himself and the present work shares many of the attributes found in works openly designated as self-portraits.

A prolific draftsman, Basquiat's studio was littered with his sketches and notebooks.  Basquiat made countless explosively expressive drawings of warrior-figures, seemingly in an effort to exorcise the demons within.  These drawings, particularly the exquisitely gestural notebook sketch from circa 1981, were used and reused as constant reference points for his paintings. The raw spontaneity captured in these drawings is transferred onto canvas in Warrior in a freshly urban and totally unique brand of intellectualized 'primitivism' which was informed by a full spectrum of art historical and cultural sources from Leonardo da Vinci, graffiti art (both modern and ancient), Cy Twombly, Jean Dubuffet, Pablo Picasso and the gritty urban environment of Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. 

A truly outstanding example of Jean-Michel Basquiat's terse aesthetic, Warrior neatly encapsulates his primary concern with the human figure, as well as revealing a direct engagement with his autobiographical struggle and his interest in art-historical precedents. Like a breath of fresh air, Basquiat's art broke rank with, usurped and, ultimately, became the canon, and was subsequently devoured by critics, dealers and collectors alike. His legacy continues to this very day: the potent exuberance of Warrior as challenging today as it was in 1982.