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Lot Essay
One of only seven editioned silkscreens created by the artist during his lifetime, Untitled is packed with historical references, diagrams and text, resulting in a vibrating synthesis of symbols that invite the viewer to decode meaning. At the height of his career in 1982, Basquiat traveled to Los Angeles with the ambition of producing a series of large-scale silkscreen, and with the help of studio owner Fred Hoffman the artist created a series of individual drawings that fused together into a final monumental image. A dramatic African mask, his iconic three-pointed crown, cartoon characters, signs, symbols, and references to histories real and imagined are all packed into an inky-black backdrop. Untitled acts as a veritable sourcebook of Basquiat’s imagery.
Like his greatest works, Untitled is ultimately biographical, combining African inspired imagery with street art, concealing heavy subject matter with his unique style. Basquiat’s combination of high intellect and urban art through an amalgamation of dichotomies speaks to the dualities in his life and career. He emerged from New York City’s “Punk Scene” in the 1980’s when the city’s downtown was buzzing with creative energy from intellectuals and artists. Like his contemporary Keith Haring, Basquiat was able to promote his own style through the act of downtown graffiti that transcended from street art into uptown fine art galleries. Labeled as a pioneer of the Neo-Expressionist movement with artists like David Salle and Julian Schnabel, Basquiat re-introduced figurative painting into contemporary art, rejecting the dominant movements of conceptual and minimal art in the 1970s.
Untitled encapsulates Basquiat at the height of his career, summing up the wide range influences and sources that he devoured. As erudite as he was streetwise, books were deeply important to Basquiat. While hospitalized as a child he pored over a copy of Gray’s Anatomy that would prove formative to his later treatments of the figure; he also often referred to Henry Dreyfuss’ 1972 Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols, which provide clues to the ‘hobo code’ and astrological ciphers in his work. Another key touchstone was a 1966 book of drawings by da Vinci, which he references by including a parachuting figure, similar to da Vinci’s flying contraption drawings. Much as Cy Twombly’s poetic scrawls – another inspiration for Basquiat – were inspired by Classical verse and graffitied Roman ruins, Basquiat conjures poly-vocal magic from his verbal and graphic sources. In his urbane play with semiotics, he sometimes scatters the book’s definitions beneath the corresponding symbols, or strands images far from their captions. Their darker undercurrents gesture toward Basquiat’s long-running concerns with issues of violence, gentrification and class and racial tensions in the American cultural landscape. Rather than in attempting to decrypt any overall message, however, the work’s joy lies in its quick-witted synthesis of a sweeping range of graphic signals that are by turns clashing and compatible, oblique and open, seemingly random and carefully considered.
As Demosthenes Davvetas has written, Basquiat’s work “is less like a mirror than like an eye and a voice: as eye, it observes and interprets life, collecting selected items and organising them within itself; thus organised, it becomes voice, a clear utterance expressing what has been seen. As voice, it approaches the aural, and many Basquiat paintings feature words that sound in one’s head as one looks at them” (D. Davvetas, ‘Lines, Chapters and Verses: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat,’ in E. Navarra (ed.), Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris 2000, p. 59). Apart from its exhilarating visual lyricism, in this work we can see remarkable evidence of Basquiat’s process, and his distinctive blend of intuition and careful study comes to scintillating new light.
Basquiat’s straightforward, unique style has held strong and has become increasingly relevant to today’s political and artistic climate. His work combines art historical and sociological references with a rawness and power that is evocative, even today. As Robert Storr explains, “Heads, often skulls, chant his words. Or rather inhale and exhale them through gritted teeth, as if sucking in the variously dense or diffuse atmosphere they create, only to cough it out again in great gusts. Eyes wide and spinning, his figures twitch and jerk like those, who, starved and gasping for oxygen get the bends or end up dizzy from hyperventilation. In these sheets as in his schematic renditions of body parts and exposed and labeled organs, Basquiat was an anatomist of sensory excess and psychic overload. There is an intrinsic ugliness to such an appetite for self-intoxication, self-revelation and self-expression. Desperation is never pretty. It can by stylish, however, and Basquiat understood this completely” (R. Storr, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Drawings, exh. cat., Robert Miller Gallery, New York, 1990).
Like his greatest works, Untitled is ultimately biographical, combining African inspired imagery with street art, concealing heavy subject matter with his unique style. Basquiat’s combination of high intellect and urban art through an amalgamation of dichotomies speaks to the dualities in his life and career. He emerged from New York City’s “Punk Scene” in the 1980’s when the city’s downtown was buzzing with creative energy from intellectuals and artists. Like his contemporary Keith Haring, Basquiat was able to promote his own style through the act of downtown graffiti that transcended from street art into uptown fine art galleries. Labeled as a pioneer of the Neo-Expressionist movement with artists like David Salle and Julian Schnabel, Basquiat re-introduced figurative painting into contemporary art, rejecting the dominant movements of conceptual and minimal art in the 1970s.
Untitled encapsulates Basquiat at the height of his career, summing up the wide range influences and sources that he devoured. As erudite as he was streetwise, books were deeply important to Basquiat. While hospitalized as a child he pored over a copy of Gray’s Anatomy that would prove formative to his later treatments of the figure; he also often referred to Henry Dreyfuss’ 1972 Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols, which provide clues to the ‘hobo code’ and astrological ciphers in his work. Another key touchstone was a 1966 book of drawings by da Vinci, which he references by including a parachuting figure, similar to da Vinci’s flying contraption drawings. Much as Cy Twombly’s poetic scrawls – another inspiration for Basquiat – were inspired by Classical verse and graffitied Roman ruins, Basquiat conjures poly-vocal magic from his verbal and graphic sources. In his urbane play with semiotics, he sometimes scatters the book’s definitions beneath the corresponding symbols, or strands images far from their captions. Their darker undercurrents gesture toward Basquiat’s long-running concerns with issues of violence, gentrification and class and racial tensions in the American cultural landscape. Rather than in attempting to decrypt any overall message, however, the work’s joy lies in its quick-witted synthesis of a sweeping range of graphic signals that are by turns clashing and compatible, oblique and open, seemingly random and carefully considered.
As Demosthenes Davvetas has written, Basquiat’s work “is less like a mirror than like an eye and a voice: as eye, it observes and interprets life, collecting selected items and organising them within itself; thus organised, it becomes voice, a clear utterance expressing what has been seen. As voice, it approaches the aural, and many Basquiat paintings feature words that sound in one’s head as one looks at them” (D. Davvetas, ‘Lines, Chapters and Verses: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat,’ in E. Navarra (ed.), Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris 2000, p. 59). Apart from its exhilarating visual lyricism, in this work we can see remarkable evidence of Basquiat’s process, and his distinctive blend of intuition and careful study comes to scintillating new light.
Basquiat’s straightforward, unique style has held strong and has become increasingly relevant to today’s political and artistic climate. His work combines art historical and sociological references with a rawness and power that is evocative, even today. As Robert Storr explains, “Heads, often skulls, chant his words. Or rather inhale and exhale them through gritted teeth, as if sucking in the variously dense or diffuse atmosphere they create, only to cough it out again in great gusts. Eyes wide and spinning, his figures twitch and jerk like those, who, starved and gasping for oxygen get the bends or end up dizzy from hyperventilation. In these sheets as in his schematic renditions of body parts and exposed and labeled organs, Basquiat was an anatomist of sensory excess and psychic overload. There is an intrinsic ugliness to such an appetite for self-intoxication, self-revelation and self-expression. Desperation is never pretty. It can by stylish, however, and Basquiat understood this completely” (R. Storr, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Drawings, exh. cat., Robert Miller Gallery, New York, 1990).