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Monograph displaying and describing the work of
Jean Michel Basquiat
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ADI ANT HILD 3
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BIOGRAPHY
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EARLY YEARS
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SYNOPSIS
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ARTWORK
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Scull 11 Notary 12 Untitled 1982 15 Arm and Hammer II 1985 17 Fexible 1982 18 Untitled History of the Black People 21
KEY IDEAS
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PERSONAL PROBLEMS
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BIOGRAPHY
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SYNOPSIS
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born on December 22, 1960, in Brooklyn, New York. He first attracted attention for his graffiti under the name “SAMO” in New York City. He sold sweatshirts and postcards featuring his artwork on the streets before his painting career took off. He collaborated with Andy Warhol in the mid-1980s, which resulted in a show of their work. Basquiat died on August 12, 1988, in New York City.
EARLY YEARS
Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December 22, 1960. With a Haitian-American father and a Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat’s diverse cultural heritage was one of his many sources of inspiration. A self-taught artist, Basquiat began drawing at an early age on sheets of paper his father, an accountant, brought home from the office. As he delved deeper into his creative side, his mother strongly encouraged to pursue artistic talents. Basquiat first attracted attention for his graffiti in New York City in the late 1970s, under the name “SAMO.” Working with a close friend, he tagged subway trains and Manhattan buildings with cryptic aphorisms. In 1977, Basquiat quit high school a year before he was slated to graduate. To make ends meet, he sold sweatshirts and postcards featuring his artwork on the streets of his native New York.
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COMMERCIAL SUCCESS
His rise coincided with the emergence of a new art movement, Noe-Expressionism, ushering in a wave of new, young and experimental artists that included Julian Schnabel and Susan Rothenberg. In the mid 1980s, Basquiat collaborated with famed pop artist Andy Warhol, which resulted in a show of their work that featured a series of corporate logos and cartoon characters. On his own, Basquiat continued to exhibit around the country and the world. In 1986, he traveled to Africa for a show in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. That same year, the 25-year-old exhibited nearly 60 paintings at the Kestner-Gesellschaft Gallery in Hanover, Germany—becoming the youngest artist to ever showcase his work there. 6
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I am not a black artist I am an artist
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An example of Basquiat’s early canvas-based work, Untitled (Skull) features a patchwork skull that seems the pictorial equivalent of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein - a sum of incongruent parts. Suspended before a New York City subway map-like background, the skull is at once a contemporary graffitist’s riff on a long Western tradition of self portraiture and the “signature piece” of some anonymous, streetwise miscreant. Basquiat’s recent past as a gritty curbside
Scull (1981) Acrylic and crayon on canvas- Private Collection
peddler, virtually homeless floater, and occasional nightclub interloper are all equally stamped into this troubled three-quarter profile, making for a world-weary icon of the displaced Puerto-Rican and Haitian immigrant Basquiat forever seemed to remain even while successfully navigating the newly gentrified streets that were 1980s SoHo.
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Notary (1983) Acrylic and crayon on canvas- Private Collection A key work that serves as an example of Basquiat’s combinatory style is Notary, which he finished in March 1983. The piece consists of a complex layering of images and symbols from Greek mythology, Roman history, and African tribal culture, among others. In the center of the painting is a black male torso, that
includes both the black flesh and facial features and the internal workings, such as the neurological wiring in the head, the spine and several organs. The depiction is similar to that in Untitled (Head), only that in Notary the combination with other stylistic means adds to the immense complexity of the painting.
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Acrylic and oil paint stick on canvas - The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat
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UNTITLED 1982
Like a page pulled cleanly from a daily artist's journal, this untitled canvas features Basquiat's personal iconography, some reminiscent of that of Paul Klee. Boldy appropriating images commonly associated with African art - a skull, a bone, an arrow - Basquiat modernizes them with his Noe-Expressionist style of thickly applied paint, rapidly rendered subjects, and scrawled linear characters, all of which float loosely across the pictorial field, as though hallucinatory. A white skull juts from the center of the ebony composition, vividly recalling a revered painter's tradition of the memento mori - a reminder of the ephemeral nature of all life and the body's eventual, merciless degeneration. Basquiat demonstrates in one concise "study" how he is able to carry on an ancient practice of painting "still life", all the while suggesting, as does a great jazz musician, that the artist's work was relatively effortless, if not completely improvisatory. 15
Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas - Gallery Bruno Bischofberger AG
17 Typical of their collaboration, "Arm and Hammer II" demonstrates how Basquiat and Warhol would pass a work between them for their mutual intervention, like a game of chance happening, free association, and mutual inspiration. Warhol's characteristic employment of corporate logos and advertising copy as shorthand signs for the materialistic modern psyche is frequently overlaid by Basquiat's only partially successful attempt to deface them, or otherwise "humanize" them, freehand, as though he were vainly railing his fist at a largely invisible and insidious monster.
ARM AND HAMMER II 1985
FLEXIBLE 1982
Artwork description & Analysis: Flexible features two of Basquiat's most famous motifs: the griot and the venerable crown. A sole black figure, half cadaver, half living entity, stares "blindly" at the viewer, its arms creating a closed circuit, perhaps a reference to spiritualized energy. With few distinguishing characteristics, the subject takes on the visage of the Everyman. At the same time, this is not just any figure, but one of African ethnicity and proud heritage a clear reference to Basquiat's own identity (note the diagrammatic rendering of the figure's lungs and abdomen, reminiscent of the young Basquiat's fascination for Gray's Anatomy sketches). Given that the griot is traditionally a kind of wandering philosopher, street performer, and social commentator all in one, it is probable that Basquiat saw himself in this role within the New York art world, one that nurtured his artistic success but also swiftly exploited it for material profit. 18
Acrylic and oil paint stick on wood - The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat
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Acrylic paint and oil paint stick on panel - The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat
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As though he were reconstructing an epic history, or precedent, for his own ancestors’ arrival on the American continent, this expansive work of the early 1980s compresses together the relationship of Egypt to Africa, with references to more local centers of African-American music and greater southern culture, such as Memphis, Tennessee. At the center of the painting, Basquiat depicts a yellow Egyptian boat being guided down the Nile River by the god Osiris. Rife with visual and textual references to African history, the painting tackles a heady subject with a deceptively naive style. Basquiat’s late-period works feature multi-panel paintings, in the tradition of Renaissance religious triptychs, and canvases with exposed stretcher bars. Often the surfaces of these pieces are virtually consumed by their own freight of dense writing, collage, and abstruse imagery.
UNTITLED HISTORY OF THE BLACK PEOPLE 1983
KEY IDEAS • Basquiat’s work is one of the few examples of how an early 1980s American Punk, or graffiti-based and counter-cultural practice could become a fully recognized, critically embraced and popularly celebrated artistic phenomenon, indeed not unlike the rise of American Hip Hop during the same era. • Despite his work’s “unstudied” appearance, Basquiat very skillfully and purposefully brought together in his art a host of disparate traditions, practices, and styles to create a unique kind of visual collage, one deriving, in part, from his urban origins, and in another a more distant, African-Caribbean heritage. • For some critics, Basquiat’s swift rise to fame and equally swift and tragic death by drug overdose epitomizes and personifies the overly commercial, hyped up international art scene of the mid 1980s, a cultural phenomenon that for many observers was symptomatic of the largely artificial bubble economy of the era. • Basquiat’s work is an example of how American artists of the 1980s could reintroduce the human figure in their work after the wide success of Minimalism and Conceptual-ism, thus establishing a dialogue with the more distant tradition of 1950s Abstract Expressionism.
PERSONAL PROBLEMS As his popularity soared, so did Basquiat’s personal problems. By the mid1980s, friends became increasingly concerned by his excessive drug use. He became paranoid and isolated himself from the world around him for long stretches. Desperate to kick a heroin addiction, he left New York for Hawaii in 1988, returning a few months later and claiming to be sober. Sadly, he wasn’t. Basquiat died of a drug overdose on August 12, 1988, in New York City. He was 27 years old. Although his art career was brief, Jean-Michel Basquiat has been credited with bringing the African-American and Latino experience in the elite art world. 22
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THANKS FOR READING
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Knock Out Punch, Andy Warhol & Jean-Michel Basquiat Studio, New York July 10, 1985 Silver Print Silver Gelatin Print Signed, titled, dated, and numbered on verso Photograph by Michael Halsband
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