Jean-Michel Basquiat

Acquired by the present owner  by descent from the artist

The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the green tones are deeper and richer, the pink tones are slightly warmer, and the blue tones around the eyes are brighter and more vibrant in the original. This work is in very good condition. The canvas has been extended along the overturn edges. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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Created in the artist's twenty-first year, Untitled is a painting of raw wall power that immediately demands our complete attention via its arresting iconography and stunning colour. The force of the composition is magnetic, conflating a wild cacophony of mark-making with an elegantly economical dispersion of brilliant hue. Frontally confronting the viewer and dominating the canvas is a powerfully delineated head, an immensley powerful example of a motif that underpins Basquiat's entire career. While the painting is scattered with the iconic marks and signs of Basquiat's incomparable aesthetic vocabulary, this visage stands as skull-like talismanic signifier. This painting immediately predates a year of breakthrough successes for the artist: he had his first solo exhibitions with Larry Gagosian in Los Angeles, Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich, and other galleries in New York and Rotterdam. The downtown Manhattan art dealer Annina Nosei had invited the artist to participate in a group show of socio-political art in September 1981, after which she became Basquiat's primary dealer. With no studio to work in, Basquiat moved into the basement of her gallery where he was at last able to paint freely and to produce a prodigious group of masterworks.

The highly stylised face, with glaring eyes and clenched teeth simultaneously evokes both the primitive scribbles of a child and the elaborate iconographies of ancient cultures. These were seminal influences on the young Basquiat who, like his hero Picasso before him, interrogated long-forgotten artistic traditions to interpret contemporary visual culture from a completely new perspective. Born to Haitian and Puerto Rican parents and growing up in the cultural crucible of Brooklyn, Basquiat was fascinated by his heritage and its artistic legacy and this head shows the especially strong effect of reliquary masks that he had seen in the Brooklyn Museum. Inspired by the Cubism of Picasso and Braque, the physiognomy also looks back to their own sources in primitive African art, in itself a validation of Basquiat's own cultural heritage. 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.

Sitting atop the head is the suggestion of a crown of thorns; another Basquiat trademark that evokes the Christian tradition, which itself inverted the triumphal attributes of the laurel wreath of Antiquity. Here it stands as metaphor for the suppressed struggle of black culture in white society, while the inscribed black lines on the white canvas recall the road-marked street graffiti of Basquiat's urban childhood. The three-pointed crown at the centre of the top left quadrant and the house-like motif in the bottom right corner are both idiomatic exclamations that punctuate Basquiat's entire oeuvre and act like a signature. This painting represents pure, raw, nervous energy with the background an extension of the psyche of the figure and by implication the artist. The full raft of scribed lines, scrawled text, diagrammatic shapes, and gestural brushstrokes forge a chaotic, unstable topography that viscerally palpitates on the surface and furthers the artist's groundbreaking questioning of established semiotic sign systems.

However, ultimately Basquiat's painting is not some secret cipher: Untitled superbly ambushes canonical and traditional expectation with electric innovation. Paramount is the insatiable originality and vigour resident in each brushstroke. This is painting unrestrained by convention and testifies to a young and brilliant spirit at the moment that he launched his groundbreaking art practice onto the New York art world.