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Lot Essay
'The young artist uses colour well but more remarkable is the educated quality of his line and the stateliness of his composition, both of which bespeak a formal training that, in fact, he never had' (V. Raynor quoted in Basquiat, exh. cat., Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, 1999, p. 330).
'I'm an artist who has been influenced by his New York environment. But I have a cultural memory. I dont need to look for it; it exists, it's over there, in Africa. That doesn't mean that I have to go live there. Our cultural memory follows us everywhere, wherever you live' (J.-M. Basquiat interview with D. Davvetas, New Art International, no. 3, October-November 1988).
New York City is one of Jean-Michel Basquiat's most prominent and recurrent themes. Here in Pedestrian 2, the artist returns to explore its vibrant streets in painting, just as he so often did in life. Painted in 1984, the vivid palette of this large-scale work perfectly captures the energetic vibes and creative zeal of the city's East Village and Lower East Side, with its new wave music, punk aesthetic and raging graffiti. One of two works realised that year with the same title, Pedestrian 2 employs a burning crimson ground interrupted by almost geometric blocks of cargo green, evocative of the wild and gritty urban jungle. A man is seen standing in the foreground, positioned in front of a rough, improvised gate and rapidly sketched apartment block. Most likely a self-portrait of the artist, the flat, opaque and totemic black figure is rendered with confident if agitated, visceral lines, hurriedly scrawled over in white paint. The scene recalls the now iconic images of the solitary artist, striding through the city with canvas, satchel and saxophone in hand as immortalised by the documentary film Downtown 81. It is a bold but lonely composition that speaks perceptively of the artists own sense of alienation as the first black, Afro-Hispanic artist to be rapturously applauded by the predominantly white contemporary art world.
With his jagged yellow teeth and gleaming, bright eyes, the crude and deadpan face of Basquiat's figure recalls the primitive African mask. At the time of Pedestrian 2's making, the artist had not yet visited Africa; he would later do so in a trip to the Ivory Coast in 1988. He was still however fascinated by elements of the country's cultural legacy. 'I have never been to Africa' he once explained, 'I'm an artist who has been influenced by his New York environment. But I have a cultural memory. I don't need to look for it; it exists, it's over there, in Africa. That doesn't mean that I have to go live there. Our cultural memory follows us everywhere, wherever you live' (J.-M. Basquiat interview with D. Davvetas, New Art International, no. 3, October-November 1988). This was certainly the case in mid-1980s New York, where the urban environment was rapidly becoming hybridized by growing Afro-Cuban, Afro-Jamaican, Afro-Domincan and Afro-Puerto Rican ethnic communities. In employing the grim but striking motif of the African mask, Basquiat was directly confronting the attendant issues, including abundant and ignorant white racist stereotypes and the deplorable condition of racial integration in the city.
In spite of Basquiat's own lack of education, he was a remarkably erudite artist, rapidly consuming art historical and popular reference books with a voracious appetite for knowledge. As critic Vivien Raynor commented on the opening of the artist's exhibition with Mary Boone in 1984, 'the young artist uses colour well...but more remarkable is the educated quality of his line and the stateliness of his composition, both of which bespeak a formal training that, in fact, he never had' (V. Raynor quoted in Basquiat, exh. cat., Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, 1999, p. 330). In Pedestrian 2 the artist's palette recalls the brilliant fields of colour painted by Abstract Expressionist Hans Hoffman. Perhaps more apposite than any other reference however is René Ricard's now renowned observation: 'if Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet had a baby and gave it up for adoption, it would be Jean-Michel. The elegance of Twombly is there and so is the brut of the young Dubuffet. Except the politics of Dubuffet needed a lecture to show, needed a separate text, whereas in Jean-Michel they are integrated by the picture's necessity' (R. Ricard, 'The Radiant Child', Artforum, December 1981, p. 43).
Big city life was a central theme for a number of cycles of work carried out by Jean Dubuffet including his Paris Circus and city scenes. With his childlike and naíve Art Brut, he pioneered a unique, psychologically charged and improvised style, dispelling concerns such as perspective and light. Much of this aesthetic is apparent in Basquiat's Pedestrian 2. Dubuffet like Basquiat often made a feature of the urban graffiti tags and inscriptions he found scratched into the wet concrete of his native city, Paris, in the 1940s. For Basquiat, his first artistic platform was of course the walks and alleyways of New York City, where he would illicitly spray paint under the epithet, SAMO. Having undergone a meteoric rise to fame in barely three years, Basquiat was propelled from the streets into the gallery, famously collaborating in 1984 with his personal idol Andy Warhol. Nevertheless, the raw essence of this inveterate urban chronicler remains distilled in the surface and composition of Pedestrian 2. It is a visually arresting painting that not only captures the contemporary zeitgeist of a city in flux, but that tells the story of Basquiat, the volatile enfant maudit.
'I'm an artist who has been influenced by his New York environment. But I have a cultural memory. I dont need to look for it; it exists, it's over there, in Africa. That doesn't mean that I have to go live there. Our cultural memory follows us everywhere, wherever you live' (J.-M. Basquiat interview with D. Davvetas, New Art International, no. 3, October-November 1988).
New York City is one of Jean-Michel Basquiat's most prominent and recurrent themes. Here in Pedestrian 2, the artist returns to explore its vibrant streets in painting, just as he so often did in life. Painted in 1984, the vivid palette of this large-scale work perfectly captures the energetic vibes and creative zeal of the city's East Village and Lower East Side, with its new wave music, punk aesthetic and raging graffiti. One of two works realised that year with the same title, Pedestrian 2 employs a burning crimson ground interrupted by almost geometric blocks of cargo green, evocative of the wild and gritty urban jungle. A man is seen standing in the foreground, positioned in front of a rough, improvised gate and rapidly sketched apartment block. Most likely a self-portrait of the artist, the flat, opaque and totemic black figure is rendered with confident if agitated, visceral lines, hurriedly scrawled over in white paint. The scene recalls the now iconic images of the solitary artist, striding through the city with canvas, satchel and saxophone in hand as immortalised by the documentary film Downtown 81. It is a bold but lonely composition that speaks perceptively of the artists own sense of alienation as the first black, Afro-Hispanic artist to be rapturously applauded by the predominantly white contemporary art world.
With his jagged yellow teeth and gleaming, bright eyes, the crude and deadpan face of Basquiat's figure recalls the primitive African mask. At the time of Pedestrian 2's making, the artist had not yet visited Africa; he would later do so in a trip to the Ivory Coast in 1988. He was still however fascinated by elements of the country's cultural legacy. 'I have never been to Africa' he once explained, 'I'm an artist who has been influenced by his New York environment. But I have a cultural memory. I don't need to look for it; it exists, it's over there, in Africa. That doesn't mean that I have to go live there. Our cultural memory follows us everywhere, wherever you live' (J.-M. Basquiat interview with D. Davvetas, New Art International, no. 3, October-November 1988). This was certainly the case in mid-1980s New York, where the urban environment was rapidly becoming hybridized by growing Afro-Cuban, Afro-Jamaican, Afro-Domincan and Afro-Puerto Rican ethnic communities. In employing the grim but striking motif of the African mask, Basquiat was directly confronting the attendant issues, including abundant and ignorant white racist stereotypes and the deplorable condition of racial integration in the city.
In spite of Basquiat's own lack of education, he was a remarkably erudite artist, rapidly consuming art historical and popular reference books with a voracious appetite for knowledge. As critic Vivien Raynor commented on the opening of the artist's exhibition with Mary Boone in 1984, 'the young artist uses colour well...but more remarkable is the educated quality of his line and the stateliness of his composition, both of which bespeak a formal training that, in fact, he never had' (V. Raynor quoted in Basquiat, exh. cat., Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, 1999, p. 330). In Pedestrian 2 the artist's palette recalls the brilliant fields of colour painted by Abstract Expressionist Hans Hoffman. Perhaps more apposite than any other reference however is René Ricard's now renowned observation: 'if Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet had a baby and gave it up for adoption, it would be Jean-Michel. The elegance of Twombly is there and so is the brut of the young Dubuffet. Except the politics of Dubuffet needed a lecture to show, needed a separate text, whereas in Jean-Michel they are integrated by the picture's necessity' (R. Ricard, 'The Radiant Child', Artforum, December 1981, p. 43).
Big city life was a central theme for a number of cycles of work carried out by Jean Dubuffet including his Paris Circus and city scenes. With his childlike and naíve Art Brut, he pioneered a unique, psychologically charged and improvised style, dispelling concerns such as perspective and light. Much of this aesthetic is apparent in Basquiat's Pedestrian 2. Dubuffet like Basquiat often made a feature of the urban graffiti tags and inscriptions he found scratched into the wet concrete of his native city, Paris, in the 1940s. For Basquiat, his first artistic platform was of course the walks and alleyways of New York City, where he would illicitly spray paint under the epithet, SAMO. Having undergone a meteoric rise to fame in barely three years, Basquiat was propelled from the streets into the gallery, famously collaborating in 1984 with his personal idol Andy Warhol. Nevertheless, the raw essence of this inveterate urban chronicler remains distilled in the surface and composition of Pedestrian 2. It is a visually arresting painting that not only captures the contemporary zeitgeist of a city in flux, but that tells the story of Basquiat, the volatile enfant maudit.