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Lot Essay
'If the rays accentuating the main figure’s nimbus are indeed meant to evoke the crown of thorns, then this same enraged hero is a martyr, a sacrifice like the Christ. In Basquiat’s situation... this is meant as a reading of his role as an artist, all the more so when we consider the various Afro-American heroes he honors: athletes and musicians whose lives tended to end as passions suffered beneath the yoke of white oppression' - Leonhard Emmerling
‘He was the once-in-a-lifetime real deal: artist as prophet’ - Glenn O’Brien
Acquired shortly after its execution by the celebrated furniture designer and curator Martin Visser, and displayed on long-term loan at the Groninger Museum, Groningen over much of the following two decades, Untitled (1983) is an electrifying work on paper by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Visser obtained the work in 1983-84 from Galerie Barbara Farber, an institution that pioneered the promotion of the American avant-garde in the Netherlands, with a particular focus on New York-based artists. Untitled fittingly exemplifies Basquiat’s practice at its thrilling height, bringing together vivid motifs, bold mark-making and fragmented text into a cacophony of colour, symbol and mercurial thought. A cruciform figure outlined in broad swathes of black ink dominates the composition. Reminiscent of a saint, a primitive idol or even the swaddled infant Christ, it also echoes the X-ray gaze of Basquiat’s iconic depictions of skull-like heads, which often bore an element of self-portraiture. Aflame with sparks and rays of bright blue, the figure’s face is accented by an ochre ring around one eye. A halo of red and green crowns its head, enhancing the sense of holy radiance; this aura is underscored by the partly crossed-out Latin legend ‘LUX LUCET IN TENEBRIS’ – ‘light shines in the darkness’ – above, which is taken from the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John. Scattered across the raw paper are other words and glyphs. The numbers 45 through 49 are written in both numerical and textual form, jostling with splashed ink and scrawled line; ‘LEFT’ and ‘RIGHT’ are boxed (in reverse, for the viewer) around the figure’s arms; two house-like icons below, one containing an ‘X’ and the other an ‘S’, are consumed by a vigorous vertical blaze of bright green oilstick, which also conceals an illegible caption beneath the figure.
‘I cross out words so you will see them more: the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them’, claimed Basquiat in a 1987 interview (J-M. Basquiat, 1987, quoted in Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gemälde und Arbeiten auf Papier (Paintings and works on paper), exh. cat., Museum Würth, Künzelsau, 2001, p. 54). Untitled’s enigmatic chorus of script, symbol and significance is a superb demonstration of the artist’s fascination with linguistic as well as imagistic force. Quoting from myriad art-historical, scientific and literary sources – Gray’s Anatomy, Leonardo, Picasso, Twombly, ancient cave paintings, contemporary graffiti, encyclopaedias, maps, liner notes from jazz LPs – Basquiat channelled words and images directly onto paper like a medium. His works often convey a particular mood with the overall tone of their semiotic and semantic ingredients, yet always hover enticingly on the brink of full legibility. The figure in Untitled is divine icon, radiant child, wicker man and voodoo doll all at once, surrounded by a polyvocal clamour of mutable meaning. The numbers and the Latin motto, instead of offering sequential understanding or a clear statement of purpose, become elements in a graphic whole that is composed from the whirl of a quickfire mind: words and figures no longer explain, but are unmoored into a luminous diversity of verbal and visual excitement.
Martin Visser, who had worked as an architectural draughtsman before making his acclaimed minimalist furniture for manufacturer 't Spectrum in the 1950s and 1960s, was head curator of modern art at Rotterdam’s Boijmans-van Beuningen Museum from 1978 to 1983; later in the eighties he returned to furniture-making, using unusual materials in a new aesthetic that, it has been claimed, stemmed from his heightened passion for contemporary art. He amassed an important collection of more than 400 works of modern art and design over his lifetime, including works by Georg Baselitz, Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Piero Manzoni, Joseph Beuys, Sol Lewitt, and Bruce Nauman. He surely appreciated the multidisciplinary imagination displayed by Basquiat in works like Untitled, which riffs on innumerable ideas and influences to conjure a rich and unexpected synthetic vision. As Robert Storr has written of Basquiat, ‘much of his work on paper bears the direct imprint of his urgency. Drawing, for him, was something you did rather than something done, an activity rather than a medium … [the drawings] were, quite simply, indestructibly vivid’ (R. Storr, ‘Two hundred beats per min.’, in Jean-Michel Basquiat: Drawings, exh. cat., New York, Robert Miller Gallery, 1990, unpaged). Untitled stands as a vital vindication of this statement: alive with Basquiat’s unmistakable energy, its incandescent colours, words and totemic power bear witness to the pure, immediate joy of creation.
‘He was the once-in-a-lifetime real deal: artist as prophet’ - Glenn O’Brien
Acquired shortly after its execution by the celebrated furniture designer and curator Martin Visser, and displayed on long-term loan at the Groninger Museum, Groningen over much of the following two decades, Untitled (1983) is an electrifying work on paper by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Visser obtained the work in 1983-84 from Galerie Barbara Farber, an institution that pioneered the promotion of the American avant-garde in the Netherlands, with a particular focus on New York-based artists. Untitled fittingly exemplifies Basquiat’s practice at its thrilling height, bringing together vivid motifs, bold mark-making and fragmented text into a cacophony of colour, symbol and mercurial thought. A cruciform figure outlined in broad swathes of black ink dominates the composition. Reminiscent of a saint, a primitive idol or even the swaddled infant Christ, it also echoes the X-ray gaze of Basquiat’s iconic depictions of skull-like heads, which often bore an element of self-portraiture. Aflame with sparks and rays of bright blue, the figure’s face is accented by an ochre ring around one eye. A halo of red and green crowns its head, enhancing the sense of holy radiance; this aura is underscored by the partly crossed-out Latin legend ‘LUX LUCET IN TENEBRIS’ – ‘light shines in the darkness’ – above, which is taken from the Prologue to the Gospel of St. John. Scattered across the raw paper are other words and glyphs. The numbers 45 through 49 are written in both numerical and textual form, jostling with splashed ink and scrawled line; ‘LEFT’ and ‘RIGHT’ are boxed (in reverse, for the viewer) around the figure’s arms; two house-like icons below, one containing an ‘X’ and the other an ‘S’, are consumed by a vigorous vertical blaze of bright green oilstick, which also conceals an illegible caption beneath the figure.
‘I cross out words so you will see them more: the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them’, claimed Basquiat in a 1987 interview (J-M. Basquiat, 1987, quoted in Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gemälde und Arbeiten auf Papier (Paintings and works on paper), exh. cat., Museum Würth, Künzelsau, 2001, p. 54). Untitled’s enigmatic chorus of script, symbol and significance is a superb demonstration of the artist’s fascination with linguistic as well as imagistic force. Quoting from myriad art-historical, scientific and literary sources – Gray’s Anatomy, Leonardo, Picasso, Twombly, ancient cave paintings, contemporary graffiti, encyclopaedias, maps, liner notes from jazz LPs – Basquiat channelled words and images directly onto paper like a medium. His works often convey a particular mood with the overall tone of their semiotic and semantic ingredients, yet always hover enticingly on the brink of full legibility. The figure in Untitled is divine icon, radiant child, wicker man and voodoo doll all at once, surrounded by a polyvocal clamour of mutable meaning. The numbers and the Latin motto, instead of offering sequential understanding or a clear statement of purpose, become elements in a graphic whole that is composed from the whirl of a quickfire mind: words and figures no longer explain, but are unmoored into a luminous diversity of verbal and visual excitement.
Martin Visser, who had worked as an architectural draughtsman before making his acclaimed minimalist furniture for manufacturer 't Spectrum in the 1950s and 1960s, was head curator of modern art at Rotterdam’s Boijmans-van Beuningen Museum from 1978 to 1983; later in the eighties he returned to furniture-making, using unusual materials in a new aesthetic that, it has been claimed, stemmed from his heightened passion for contemporary art. He amassed an important collection of more than 400 works of modern art and design over his lifetime, including works by Georg Baselitz, Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Piero Manzoni, Joseph Beuys, Sol Lewitt, and Bruce Nauman. He surely appreciated the multidisciplinary imagination displayed by Basquiat in works like Untitled, which riffs on innumerable ideas and influences to conjure a rich and unexpected synthetic vision. As Robert Storr has written of Basquiat, ‘much of his work on paper bears the direct imprint of his urgency. Drawing, for him, was something you did rather than something done, an activity rather than a medium … [the drawings] were, quite simply, indestructibly vivid’ (R. Storr, ‘Two hundred beats per min.’, in Jean-Michel Basquiat: Drawings, exh. cat., New York, Robert Miller Gallery, 1990, unpaged). Untitled stands as a vital vindication of this statement: alive with Basquiat’s unmistakable energy, its incandescent colours, words and totemic power bear witness to the pure, immediate joy of creation.