JEAN-MICHEL
BASQUIAT
ENGLISH I
FOREWORD
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BERNARD ARNAULT
PREFACE
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SUZANNE PAGÉ
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: THE EXISTENTIAL LINE DIETER BUCHHART, exhibition curator
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EL GRAN ESPECTÁCULO: JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, MODERNITY, MODERNISM OKWUI ENWEZOR
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THE HEADS OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT JORDANA MOORE SAGGESE
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NEW YORK TO LOS ANGELES: JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT’S QUICK TRIP PAUL SCHIMMEL
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CLASSICAL CONTEMPORARY: REFLECTIONS ON JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT FRANKLIN SIRMANS
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TIME IS NOW OLIVIER MICHELON
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JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: RIDING WITH DEATH FRANCESCO PELLIZZI
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Chronology Compiled by Anna Karina Hofbauer
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Selective bibliography
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THE SPECTACLE OF HISTORY Pharaoh and a seated black figure identified In 1983, Basquiat produced three significant with crossed-out text written across its body large-scale paintings in which he unambigu- as “slave” and “esclav.” It is with this improbaously announced himself as an artist whose ble trajectory that Basquiat brings us to the central concern within painterly representa- much commented upon Undiscovered Genius tion was the grand theater of world history. of the Mississippi Delta, into “the deep south” The paintings: El Gran Espectáculo (History of of Mark Twain, Negroes, and cotton plantaBlack People) (fig. 2), also known as The Nile; tions. This painting and its various entangleToussaint L’Overture versus Savonarola; and ments elicited several other paintings with the Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta same title and on the same theme. Basquiat record a radical, historical, temporal, and geo- mapped similar conjunctions in the figure of graphical span that intersect the triangular the black maid in Untitled (Maid from grand narrative of the Middle Passage, and the Olympia) (1982) and Three Quarters of Atlantic world that connects Africa, the Olympia Minus the Servant (1982) in reference Americas, and Europe. Shifting from left to to Édouard Manet’s controversial painting right across the horizontal plane of the canvas, Olympia (1863). These searching connections El Gran Espectáculo traces the passage of in Basquiat’s work narrativize the fecund culAfricans from builders of civilization along the tural sediment enriched by the enslavement of east-north parallels of the Nile Valley in Nuba, Africans in North America. This is further Sudan to the trading Pharaonic capital of enriched by the cross-cultural exploration of Memphis in ancient Egypt, then down to the impact of Africans on American culture Thebes as the Nile flows into the Mediterranean through the manifestation of Blues and Jazz and up to Memphis, Tennessee. Symbols such along the spine of the Mississippi River as it as the eye of Horus, a hieroglyph signifying cleaves the country into South and North, and royal power, good health, and protection in the in its directional flow from West to East. The central portion of the painting are comingled painting tests the resilience of artistic boundwith an image of the guardian dog of the aries within the living cultural systems that
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have fed and sustained the country’s cultural identity, even as the producers and innovators of that unique culture remained for much of their three-century sojourn in that region, properties of other human beings. And finally, in Toussaint L’Overture versus Savonarola, Basquiat puts his audience in a bind, first by testing their historical knowledge and geographic memories. Who were the two central protagonists of this history painting? Who was “Toussaint Louverture”? And who was Savonarola? Why the specific contrast between a Haitian independence hero and a heretic Northern Italian clerical rebel? Toussaint Louverture as the military strategist and leader of the Haitian Revolution is comparable to George Washington in the fight to free a people and create a modern functioning state and nation under the leadership of those who were either former slaves or whose parents were slaves. Louverture remains one of the most celebrated figures in the history of African decolonization movements, for in defeating France and liberating the slave society of Saint-Domingue, he laid the foundation that enabled his military cohorts to not only
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create Haiti (1804), the first modern black republic, just a few decades after American independence from Britain, but also transform an enslaved society into a free, decolonized nation. Linking Louverture and the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola—who preached against corruption, despotic rule, and exploitation of the poor, while urging his followers to work on bringing about republican freedoms and religious reform—brings the Haitian Revolution into the same discursive terrain as the Florentine clerical rebellion Savonarola led in the late fifteenth century. Was Basquiat’s interest in this obscure clerical rebel based on the shared politics between the two rebellious figures, or was it based on the superficial connection that links the Dominican order with Saint-Domingue? Whatever the motivation was, Basquiat’s quest during this period, in the Neo-Expressionist climate of early 1980s New York, where history had been evacuated and cultural subjectivity untethered in favor of the reigning commodity fetishism of painting, constituted a counterproposal. This is made explicitly clear in his choices of subject matter in the three
1. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta, 1983, acrylic, oilstick, and paper collage on canvas, five panels, 124.5 × 471.2 cm. Private collection.
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6. Jean-Michel Basquiat, King of the Zulus, 1984–1985, acrylic, oilstick, and paper collage on canvas, 218.5 × 173 cm. Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseille.
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7. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Charles the First, 1982 (cat. 78). 8. Jean-Michel Basquiat, CPRKR, 1982 (cat. 77).
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14 UNTITLED, 1981 Oilstick on paper, 30.3 × 45.5 cm. Private collection. Courtesy Éditions Enrico Navarra
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15 HEAD, 1982–1983 Oilstick on paper, 45.5 × 61 cm. L. & P. Seguin
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11. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Florence, 1983 (cat. 94). 12. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1982 (cat. 9). 13. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1983 (cat. 5).
of Congo), for example, often have bundles of in Modernism. More specifically, as a person of medicine stored in the head of the sculpture. In African descent, Basquiat was surely invested other examples of African sculpture, the head in the irony of a modern art history that sysof the figure is distorted—accounting for one- tematically excludes artists of African descent third to one-fourth of the total height of the while simultaneously remaining indebted to figure—in order to emphasize its importance as them. We cannot help but think of the works of the site of wisdom and personality. We see the Pablo Picasso, who so boldly referred to the physical representation of the head as a site of forms of African masks in his own renowned power in several examples throughout Robert paintings. We can see Basquiat’s insertion of Farris Thompson’s seminal text Flash of the himself into this history in an untitled work Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and from 1983, where the young artist has spread Philosophy (a book known to have been in paint over the surface of a poster announcing Basquiat’s library), which discusses at length Picasso’s exhibition thirty years earlier, signing the connections between art and culture from it with his own signature in two places (fig. 14) the African continent and its diasporas. We in an antiphonal act of performance. The bold can find, for example, an excerpt from strokes of pink curve along the side of the face Thompson’s text in Basquiat’s 1983 canvas of Picasso’s figure, further isolating it from the Florence (fig. 11). The black head on the left of background and flattening its form. In just a the composition, with a pointed, elongated few strokes, Basquiat has focused our attention shape protruding from the top, recalls repre- on the source of Picasso’s portrait—African sentations of the Orisha Èshù-Elégbára in masks. Basquiat signed not only the poster Flash of the Spirit that show a similar knifelike itself in the lower right corner but the Picasso shape rising out of the head. According to portrait as well, highlighting the problems Thompson, “When a knifelike element rises out around authorship in African-influenced of Elegba’s [Èshù-Elégbára’s] head, it is a sign European Modernism. In true postmodernist that the display of his powers has begun, the fashion, Basquiat’s focus on Picasso’s own illustration of the wonder (ara) from which his appropriation of African art does not solely special name, Eshu Odara, ‘the Wonder- concern Picasso’s imitation of or influence by Worker,’ derives.”9 African art, but also concerns the relationship between the authorial function and the repetiBasquiat’s representation (and preservation) of tive function—that is, the difference between the head as the flattened, exterior surface of the mechanical and the expressive. What is the the face alone also connects to the African con- difference between Basquiat’s heads that cept of masking as a display of power. The appear as masks and those of Picasso? masklike faces of many of Basquiat’s heads (figs. 12, 13) were undoubtedly influenced by As Thomas McEvilley has explained, “By takhis exposure to African art via Thompson’s ing on the role of the white borrower, Basquiat book, as well as the public collections of the collapsed the distance between the colonizer New York museums he so often visited. Masks and the colonized, embodying both at once.”10 also play an important role in the perfor- In other words, Basquiat inverted the model by mances of West African power associations including and imitating the production of across Mali, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, and white culture as a nonwhite artist. We might Guinea, as well as in the ritual performance of interpret this inversion as the disidentification Yoruba-based religious traditions. The projec- theorized by José Esteban Muñoz—that is, tions from the top of the head in Basquiat’s Basquiat’s cannibalization of mainstream art drawings recall the feathers or raffia that we practices goes further than simple appropriamight expect to see on masks in performance. tion. He assumed the position of the mainThe exaggerated eyes, noses, and mouths in stream in order to highlight the politics of the contrasting colors similarly abstract these masks, marginal. Disidentification is a strategy making them appear different from a portrait or adopted by many minoritarian subjects, who other precise likeness. These abstract features of must cope with the fiction of identity in very African masks were in fact the major impetus real terms. Muñoz highlights the ways in behind their incorporation into early twentieth- which identities of difference (queer people of century Modernist painting, which sought for- color, specifically) are formed via their interacmal inspiration for an increasingly abstracted tions with the dominant culture; these “identities are formed in response to the cultural representation of the figure. logics of heteronormativity, white supremacy, Basquiat’s masks, and African masks in partic- and misogyny—cultural logics that … undergird ular, connect to the artist’s larger investment work to undergird state power.”11 Basquiat’s
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DUALITY
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44 BAPTISMAL, 1982 Acrylic, oilstick, and paper collage on canvas, 243.8 × 244.2 cm. Collection of Valentino Garavani, London
61 UNTITLED (TENANT), 1982 Acrylic and oilstick on canvas, 188 × 244 cm. Courtesy of Van de Weghe, New York
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83 NOW’S THE TIME, 1985 Oilstick and acrylic on plywood, diam. 235 cm. Courtesy The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, Connecticut, United States
102 GRILLO, 1984 Acrylic, oil, paper collage, oilstick, and nails on wood, 243.8 × 537.2 × 47 cm. Fondation Louis Vuitton
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114 UNTITLED, 1987 Acrylic, oil, graphite, colored pen, and paper collage on canvas, 228.6 × 272.4 cm. The Collection of John & Amy Phelan
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119 EXU, 1988 Acrylic and oilstick on canvas, 199.5 × 254 cm. Private collection
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121 RIDING WITH DEATH, 1988 Acrylic and oilstick on canvas, 248.9 × 289.5 cm. Private collection
Cover Grillo, 1984 (cat. 102), detail of right panel Back cover Grillo, 1984 (cat. 102), detail of left panl This catalogue is set in Replica (Lineto) and Foundry Origin (The Foundry) Paper: Magno Mat 150 g/m2 (interior) Photoengraving : Arciel Graphic Printed in September 2018 by Maestro in Trento. Printed in Italy. © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2018 www.gallimard.fr © Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2018 www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr
Legal deposit: October 2018 ISBN: 978-2-07-280152-5 Edition number: 337920