Jean-Michel Basquiat

Annina Nosei Gallery, New York

Private Collection 

Sale: Christie’s, New York, Contemporary Art Day Sale, 12 May 2004, Lot 394

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner 

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate although the orange tones are lighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The sheet is attached verso to the backing board in several places. Close inspection reveals a minor crease to the top left corner and minor wear to the lower left and top right corner tips.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s electrifying work on paper Brown Eggs is an explosive outburst of creative energy and vibrant colour, mixing ardent shades of red and orange with a rich palette of darker black and blue tones. The powerful gaze of a mask-like face appears out of a cacophony of frenzied lines, gestural expressions, cryptic words, and ambiguous symbols. The circular shape of the piercing eyes are reflected in the depiction of eggs at the bottom of the paper, which are again mirrored in the two underlined words BROWN EGGS written in capital letters. The eggs, the glassy eyes, the gritted teeth, the skeletal appearance of the head, as well as the playful use of words in a Dadaist manner are all recurrent elements within Basquiat’s oeuvre and are testament to a unique artistic code that defined his complex pictorial compositions.

In its abundant colourfulness and frenetic use of graphic line, Brown Eggs foretells many of the artist’s major works depicting colossal disembodied craniums, such as Untitled (Skull) (1982) presently housed in the Broad Art Foundation, or In this Case from 1983. Part self-portrait and part racial allegory, these heads are loaded with socio-political symbols and commentary. Throughout his career Basquiat continuously referenced black American legends such as Langston Hughes, Henry Armstrong, or Sugar Ray Robinson; though undoubtedly intended as hero worship, this celebration of notable black figures is nonetheless doubled-edged. Restricted to the realms of music and sport, Basquiat highlights the limitations of black success in the second half of the Twentieth Century. This racial critique is subtly presented in Brown Eggs and heralds one of the artist’s later paintings, Eyes and Eggs from 1983. Both works are a masterful example of what Basquiat perceived to be a societal view on black Americans: a tortured-looking cliché of a servant or waiter presenting egg yolks that rhyme visually with the glaring sockets in his skull as if serving up a vision for his patrons to consume. “…Everything Jean did was a challenge to the art world. He was throwing down. He wasn’t just a wannabe or pretender; he confronted the values, standards and practices of the art world, holding out for something stronger, tougher, more precious and more human” (Glenn O’Brien, ‘Greatest Hits’, in: Exhibition Catalogue, Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now’s the Time, 2015, p. 177).

Conceived in 1981, Brown Eggs stands at a turning point in Basquiat’s short but prolific artistic career. In February of the same year, Basquiat was included in the multi-disciplinary show New York/New Wave at MoMA P.S.1 in Queens. This show marked the artist’s transition from the streets to galleries and museums and would set the foundation for his unparalleled ascent onto the international art scene. In September, the gallerist Annina Nosei offered Basquiat the basement of her eponymous gallery in SoHo to use as a studio. Writing on Basquiat’s first solo show at Nosei’s gallery in 1982, art critic and curator Jeffrey Deitch noted: “Basquiat is likened to the wild boy raised by wolves, corralled into Annina's basement and given nice clean canvases to work on instead of anonymous walls. A child of the streets gawked at by the intelligentsia. But Basquiat is hardly a primitive. He's more like a rock star... [He] reminds me of Lou Reed singing brilliantly about heroin to nice college boys” (Jeffrey Deitch quoted in: Cathleen McGuigan, ‘New Art, New Money’, The New York Times, 10 February 1985, n.p.). In these nascent works from 1981, Basquiat's abundant talent and fluent command of paint and its history is powerfully redolent. 

In the present work, the face is a vivacious disjunction of pure colour fields and frenetic linear scrawls that form and deform a shamanistic face; the result is a poetic conflation of sense, nonsense, sound and words. The rich colour spectrum here recalls the dramatic gestures of Abstract Expressionist painters such as Clyfford Still or Jackson Pollock while the oilstick-drawn linearity outlining the face’s silhouette alludes to the graphic immediacy of Cy Twombly. Herein, Brown Eggs is a brilliant example from this seminal moment in Basquiat’s career. Prodigious talent here tempers the impact of an eclectic underground contemporaneity and combines it with an art historical fluency and politically charged conceptual rigour to create a cross-cultural visual idiom with a vigorous humanistic backbone.