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Lot Essay
Like all great artists, Jean-Michel Basquiat's best work embodies both his historic time and specific place, as well a perpetual sense of the contemporary that can only be truly perceived with the passage of time. One doubts Basquiat could have fully imagined the global information age young artists today inhabit, yet his work seems all about that. At the very same time, it is all about New York City in 1982. His work leapt from the streets and the City's maelstrom.
We see a contorted and explosive figure filled out with plangent reds and oranges. He wears a mask vaguely resembling African sculpture with blaring teeth, red eyes and two decorative circles at his ears, likely attributes of power. Cryptic symbols, hieroglyphs and letters surround him. The letters start off spelling "a m o r s" but then become decidedly indecipherable.
The ambiguity is key. The subject of this work extends his arms awkwardly. It could indicate political power, as a politician giving an explosive oratory. Or the figure may read as a Christ-like last judgement pose in which the right arm lifts up the righteous while the left arm casts down the damned. It could also indicate defensiveness or impending doom, as he protects himself from something from above. Or the violence could have already happened, and the subject, arms splayed and disjointed, is broken.
Whether the subject is broken or not, breaking is the primary subject of the work: specifically the cracking apart of prescribed meaning and language. Basquiat breaks the linear narrative of traditional western painting. Basquiat's work dictates an alternative order, and thus, it achieves nothing less than a revolution in a William Burroughs cut-up or Be-bop jazz vocabulary
All revolutions are about shifts in power. Richard Marshall writes:
"To Basquiat information was power, and he unleashed this power in his drawings, transforming the act of reading into a visual experience. In drawing, Basquat discovered the ideal form of visual expression that was compatible with his inherent appreciation of the naive, childlike figures, cartoons, scribblings, cryptic signs, and letter printing" (R. Marshall, Jean-Michel Basquiat: works on paper, Paris, 1999, p. 45).
We see a contorted and explosive figure filled out with plangent reds and oranges. He wears a mask vaguely resembling African sculpture with blaring teeth, red eyes and two decorative circles at his ears, likely attributes of power. Cryptic symbols, hieroglyphs and letters surround him. The letters start off spelling "a m o r s" but then become decidedly indecipherable.
The ambiguity is key. The subject of this work extends his arms awkwardly. It could indicate political power, as a politician giving an explosive oratory. Or the figure may read as a Christ-like last judgement pose in which the right arm lifts up the righteous while the left arm casts down the damned. It could also indicate defensiveness or impending doom, as he protects himself from something from above. Or the violence could have already happened, and the subject, arms splayed and disjointed, is broken.
Whether the subject is broken or not, breaking is the primary subject of the work: specifically the cracking apart of prescribed meaning and language. Basquiat breaks the linear narrative of traditional western painting. Basquiat's work dictates an alternative order, and thus, it achieves nothing less than a revolution in a William Burroughs cut-up or Be-bop jazz vocabulary
All revolutions are about shifts in power. Richard Marshall writes:
"To Basquiat information was power, and he unleashed this power in his drawings, transforming the act of reading into a visual experience. In drawing, Basquat discovered the ideal form of visual expression that was compatible with his inherent appreciation of the naive, childlike figures, cartoons, scribblings, cryptic signs, and letter printing" (R. Marshall, Jean-Michel Basquiat: works on paper, Paris, 1999, p. 45).