Jean-Michel Basquiat

Diego Cortez, New York
Private Collection, New York

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is more saturated in the original. The catalogue illustration also fails to fully convey the three-dimensional nature of the work. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition. All surface irregularities appear to be in keeping with the artist's working method.
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Characterised by several of the artist’s most iconic motives, and executed in his instantly recognizable visual language, Untitled is a powerful example of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s highly influential oeuvre. Bringing together his interest in language, anatomy and the aesthetic of street culture, the work stands as a powerful tribute not just to the artist’s career, but indeed also to his personal life - juxtaposing hints of a complex personal history with an appetite for understanding his immediate surroundings. The work brilliantly exemplifies his unparalleled ability to create overwhelmingly powerful works that capture his concerns on a material, formal and symbolic level.

Reflecting the alternative New York street culture of which he was an integral part, Basquiat was one of the first artists who managed to insert the outsider language of graffiti into the institutional art world, without losing sight of the urgency and ideological agenda behind its initial source. On a material basis, the present work perfectly exemplifies this in the unorthodox use of a wooden support, which is indeed reminiscent of the doors and other found materials that Basquiat used in his early years. The raw appearance of Untitled, in which Xerox copies from a notebook are juxtaposed with abstract washes of paint on top of a wooden construction that has likely been repurposed by the artist, are integral elements of Basquiat’s signature aesthetic.

Moreover, Untitled captures two of the artist’s most important subjects: on the one hand his interest in language, expressed in through long lists of words, often crossed out or circled; and on the other hand his fascination with anatomy. If one contextualizes what is perhaps the most striking element of this work, the drawn human form (here labeled and annotated) the thematic intricacies of Basquiat’s Untitled become immediately obvious. The drawing mirrors a traumatic car accident suffered by the artist at the age of six, in 1968. Whilst recovering from the consequent surgery, Basquiat’s mother gave him a copy of Gray’s Anatomy which he read with extreme thoroughness, memorizing almost every bone and muscle constituting the human body and most importantly, drawing them. Many of Basquiat’s works prominently feature this analysis of the human body and its individual parts, whether a simple bone or a fuller silhouette, in reference to his experience.

The second key motif in Untitled is found in the list of products and materials which ranges from foods such as rye, wheat and oats to industrial materials like cadmium and aluminium. Continuing the artist’s interest in unconventional, inexpensive materials that also form the basis of the present work on a material level, Basquiat was deeply concerned with the side-effects of capitalism and the systems that control and exploit natural resources for the creation of wealth. As Richard Marshall observed: “These frequent references (…) reveal Basquiat’s interest in aspects of commerce - trading, selling and buying. Basquiat is scrutinizing man’s seizure and monopolization of the earth’s animal and material resources, and questioning why and how these resources, that are ideally owned by all of the world’s inhabitants, have become objects of manipulation, power, and wealth at the expense of the wellbeing of all mankind” (Richard Marshall, ‘Jean-Michel Basquiat and his Subjects’, quoted in: Enrico Navarra, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris, 2000, p. 43).

Throughout his short but impressive career, Basquiat used representation in a way that disrupted norms and expectations. The artist’s consistently defiant approach is reminiscent of his original emergence on lower Manhattan’s graffiti scene where one of his first projects was a provocative collective named SAMO save idiots, founded with his friend and past classmate Al Diaz. The pair would spray their heading (which stood for “Same Old Shit”), along with street poetry imbued with social criticisms, all around the streets of Manhattan. Though the project eventually ended, it marked the beginning of his meteoric rise within the New York art scene. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s energetic and rebellious art embraces all of its surroundings –from high culture to jazz to cartoons –and make his work stand out as some of the most visually powerful and critical works of recent decades. Bringing together some of the key elements from the artist’s oeuvre –his fusion of street culture and high art, his interest in human anatomy, the commodification of natural materials, and of course his unique visual language –the present work is in every way an iconic testament to Basquiat’s life and art.