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Lot Essay
‘In Basquiat’s drawings…you are sucked in and carried along an often intricate and complex journey through a maze of references which oftentimes make little rational sense but nonetheless feel like they have a reason to exist’ (F. Hoffman, in Jean-Michel Basquiat: Drawing, exh. cat., Acquavella Galleries, New York, 2014, p. 37).
Bursting with a litany of words, symbols and signifiers, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s large Untitled, 1986, is a captivating example of the artist’s acclaimed graphic practice. Simultaneously drawing, collage and urban poem, it was undertaken just two years before his sudden death at the young age of twenty-seven. Masterfully marrying the energy of his haiku street graffiti with the stream of consciousness of Cy Twombly, Basquiat gives his breathless visual vocabulary free reign, inviting the viewer to decipher the rich and suggestive narrative he gleefully presents to us. The fragmented assemblage of symbols, words, diagrams and images scattered throughout the composition collide to create a near-encyclopaedic canon of motifs from Basquiat’s own oeuvre that fill the pictorial surface from edge-to-edge. Untitled carries evidence of the dynamic energy that helped propel Basquiat from the street to stardom in New York art scene in the 1980, and is infused with the multiplicity of sounds, sights, and energy of New York street scene together with his own reverence for the rich art historical tradition he found at museums he visited weekly. ‘Drawing, for him, was something you did rather than something done,’ Robert Storr once noted, ‘an activity rather than a medium’ (D. Buchhart, Basquiat, exh. cat., Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2010, p. 10).
A physical manifestation of Basquiat’s thought process, Untitled is a dense amalgamation of the artist’s personally-lived experience as a young black man in urban society and culture, liberally exploring a plethora of subjects without judgment. Dominating the left portion of the paper is Basquiat's riff on the ubiquitous pictogram of a penguin clad in a bow tie, red tuxedo and top hat holding a martini glass. Whilst sketched like a character from a comic book or graphic novel, this is a witty reference to the universal symbol for frozen material that Basquiat seems to have derived from Henry Dreyfuss’ Symbol Sourcebook from 1972. The penguin is a reoccurring motif in Basquiat’s practice in the mid-1980s that is often accompanied by metonyms for black ‘coolness’, as, in the present work, ice-cubes and the caption ‘perishable keep frozen’. Dreyfuss’ compilation of international graphic symbols was a rich source of inspiration for the artist, and is here gleefully transformed by Basquiat’s hand into an array of hieroglyphs. The Xerox photocopy on the upper right hand corner further testifies to the artist’s fascination with anatomical drawings, inspired by the infamous drawing book Grey's Anatomy he received as a child by his mother and Leonardo da Vinci’s investigative studies of the human being. Inserted within this seemingly carefree world of cacti, penguins, and armadillos, however, is also the black figure on the bottom right; with its hollow, oval eyes is hauntingly reminiscent of the black figure in Basquiat’s Jim Crow, painted in the same year as this very drawing.
Evoking the intuitive scrawls of Cy Twombly, we see Basquiat’s trademark vernacular of words and images drawn, scored through, obscured and rewritten. Only the white surface of the paper acts as pauses for thought and breath. Critics have argued that by looking at Twombly’s work, Basquiat gained permission to ‘draw in the raw’, producing drawings, and also paintings, imbued with an intensity that has since become synonymous with Basquiat’s unique form of artistic expression. It was through him that he began to see drawing as something more like an activity than a medium. Yet whereas Twombly cancels to cancel, so to speak, Basquiat cancels to reveal: ‘I cross out words so you will see them more. The fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them' (J.M. Basquiat, quoted in 'Royalty, Heroism and the Streets: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat', in R. Marshall (ed.), Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York 1992, pp. 28-43). In Untitled, this statement is visualized with Basquiat’s signature spontaneity, wit, and menace through the alluring combination of crossed out words and the depiction, in image and text, of ‘pliable soft erasers’.
Basquiat furthermore engages in the self-referential act of pasting Xerox photocopies of his own drawings onto the surface of Untitled, thereby giving rise to a collage that uniquely fuses traditional art historical references and modern day street culture. While Robert Rauschenberg with his egalitarian transformation and presentation of source imagery was an important precedent and inspiration in this regard, the fragmented, raw and immediate quality of Basquiat’s hybrid works are more specifically driven by his embrace of the unrestricted and raw nature of the expressive forms of graffiti and rap. As Franklin Sirmans indeed notes, ‘it is Basquiat’s overall inventiveness in marrying text and image – with words cut, pasted, recycled, scratched out, and repeated – that speaks to the innovation inherent in the hip-hop moment of the late 1970s. When it was all about two turntables and a microphone, likewise Basquiat began with simple, readily available tools: paper, pens and a Xerox machine’ (F. Sirmans, ‘In the Cipher: Basquiat and Hip- Hop Culture’, in M. Mayer (ed.), Basquiat, exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum, New York, 2005, p. 94). While Untitled brilliantly reflects Basquiat’s skillful navigation of multiple visual registers, it retains an indestructible sense of individuality. As Marc Mayer has written, ‘he papers over all other voices but his own, hallucinating total control of his proprietary information as if he were the author of all he transcribed, every diagram, every formula, every cartoon character – even affixing the copyright symbol to countless artifacts of nature and civilization to stress the point – without making any allowances for the real-life look of the world outside his authorized universe’ (M. Mayer, ‘Basquiat in History’, in Basquiat, exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, 2005, p. 48). It is this powerful sense of identity that continues to uphold the enduring visual quality of Basquiat's works.
Bursting with a litany of words, symbols and signifiers, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s large Untitled, 1986, is a captivating example of the artist’s acclaimed graphic practice. Simultaneously drawing, collage and urban poem, it was undertaken just two years before his sudden death at the young age of twenty-seven. Masterfully marrying the energy of his haiku street graffiti with the stream of consciousness of Cy Twombly, Basquiat gives his breathless visual vocabulary free reign, inviting the viewer to decipher the rich and suggestive narrative he gleefully presents to us. The fragmented assemblage of symbols, words, diagrams and images scattered throughout the composition collide to create a near-encyclopaedic canon of motifs from Basquiat’s own oeuvre that fill the pictorial surface from edge-to-edge. Untitled carries evidence of the dynamic energy that helped propel Basquiat from the street to stardom in New York art scene in the 1980, and is infused with the multiplicity of sounds, sights, and energy of New York street scene together with his own reverence for the rich art historical tradition he found at museums he visited weekly. ‘Drawing, for him, was something you did rather than something done,’ Robert Storr once noted, ‘an activity rather than a medium’ (D. Buchhart, Basquiat, exh. cat., Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2010, p. 10).
A physical manifestation of Basquiat’s thought process, Untitled is a dense amalgamation of the artist’s personally-lived experience as a young black man in urban society and culture, liberally exploring a plethora of subjects without judgment. Dominating the left portion of the paper is Basquiat's riff on the ubiquitous pictogram of a penguin clad in a bow tie, red tuxedo and top hat holding a martini glass. Whilst sketched like a character from a comic book or graphic novel, this is a witty reference to the universal symbol for frozen material that Basquiat seems to have derived from Henry Dreyfuss’ Symbol Sourcebook from 1972. The penguin is a reoccurring motif in Basquiat’s practice in the mid-1980s that is often accompanied by metonyms for black ‘coolness’, as, in the present work, ice-cubes and the caption ‘perishable keep frozen’. Dreyfuss’ compilation of international graphic symbols was a rich source of inspiration for the artist, and is here gleefully transformed by Basquiat’s hand into an array of hieroglyphs. The Xerox photocopy on the upper right hand corner further testifies to the artist’s fascination with anatomical drawings, inspired by the infamous drawing book Grey's Anatomy he received as a child by his mother and Leonardo da Vinci’s investigative studies of the human being. Inserted within this seemingly carefree world of cacti, penguins, and armadillos, however, is also the black figure on the bottom right; with its hollow, oval eyes is hauntingly reminiscent of the black figure in Basquiat’s Jim Crow, painted in the same year as this very drawing.
Evoking the intuitive scrawls of Cy Twombly, we see Basquiat’s trademark vernacular of words and images drawn, scored through, obscured and rewritten. Only the white surface of the paper acts as pauses for thought and breath. Critics have argued that by looking at Twombly’s work, Basquiat gained permission to ‘draw in the raw’, producing drawings, and also paintings, imbued with an intensity that has since become synonymous with Basquiat’s unique form of artistic expression. It was through him that he began to see drawing as something more like an activity than a medium. Yet whereas Twombly cancels to cancel, so to speak, Basquiat cancels to reveal: ‘I cross out words so you will see them more. The fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them' (J.M. Basquiat, quoted in 'Royalty, Heroism and the Streets: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat', in R. Marshall (ed.), Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York 1992, pp. 28-43). In Untitled, this statement is visualized with Basquiat’s signature spontaneity, wit, and menace through the alluring combination of crossed out words and the depiction, in image and text, of ‘pliable soft erasers’.
Basquiat furthermore engages in the self-referential act of pasting Xerox photocopies of his own drawings onto the surface of Untitled, thereby giving rise to a collage that uniquely fuses traditional art historical references and modern day street culture. While Robert Rauschenberg with his egalitarian transformation and presentation of source imagery was an important precedent and inspiration in this regard, the fragmented, raw and immediate quality of Basquiat’s hybrid works are more specifically driven by his embrace of the unrestricted and raw nature of the expressive forms of graffiti and rap. As Franklin Sirmans indeed notes, ‘it is Basquiat’s overall inventiveness in marrying text and image – with words cut, pasted, recycled, scratched out, and repeated – that speaks to the innovation inherent in the hip-hop moment of the late 1970s. When it was all about two turntables and a microphone, likewise Basquiat began with simple, readily available tools: paper, pens and a Xerox machine’ (F. Sirmans, ‘In the Cipher: Basquiat and Hip- Hop Culture’, in M. Mayer (ed.), Basquiat, exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum, New York, 2005, p. 94). While Untitled brilliantly reflects Basquiat’s skillful navigation of multiple visual registers, it retains an indestructible sense of individuality. As Marc Mayer has written, ‘he papers over all other voices but his own, hallucinating total control of his proprietary information as if he were the author of all he transcribed, every diagram, every formula, every cartoon character – even affixing the copyright symbol to countless artifacts of nature and civilization to stress the point – without making any allowances for the real-life look of the world outside his authorized universe’ (M. Mayer, ‘Basquiat in History’, in Basquiat, exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, 2005, p. 48). It is this powerful sense of identity that continues to uphold the enduring visual quality of Basquiat's works.