Job Analisis

Jean-Michel Basquiat's Job Analisis was painted in 1982, the year he exploded on the international stage as the new, much-talked-about wunderkind of contemporary art. Forming the apex of the artist's all-too-brief career, this was a time when Basquiat - energized, enthusiastic and hungry for success - was rapidly creating the body of work by which posterity would later judge him. Only a year before, the 21-year-old painter had been living an itinerant lifestyle, drifting between random Downtown New York addresses, playing for the band Gray at the Mudd Club and working as a street artist under the tag of SAMO. Now he completed his transformation from SAMO into "Jean-Michel Basquiat art star." Having secured the support of several ambitious art dealers and a studio in which to work, Basquiat produced some of the most startling and vital paintings of his entire oeuvre. Basquiat had a series of important solo exhibitions and wildly enthusiastic critical reviews, which characterized the year. Then he caused a sensation by becoming the youngest artist ever to be included in Germany's Documenta. Despite his tender years and his art's newness, critics universally saw Basquiat's large and powerful paintings as holding their own alongside the strongest work of the major figures in contemporary art. "I had some money," Basquiat said of this time, "I made the best paintings ever. I was completely reclusive, worked a lot, took a lot of drugs. I was awful to people" (J. Basquiat, quoted in C. McGuigan, "New Art, New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist," The New York Times Magazine, February 10, 1985, p.29).

Job Analisis marks the suddenly-arrived-at and seemingly easy mature style that clearly distinguishes Basquiat's 1982 paintings, filled with spontaneity and rebellion. It throbs with a network of impulses that jarringly fuse figurative imagery and disjunctive words with the artist's distinctively chaotic and arcane magic. In this painting, Basquiat gave full range to his uniquely swift and deliberately adolescent method of draftsmanship. Colored oil stick is scrawled freestyle over a palimpsest of broadly applied brushstrokes. He coupled this method's naivety with simple, direct references to the cartoons and slapstick comedies that Basquiat loved. He coarsely drew mug shots of Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny on the right side the canvas. Below them, the repeated title "What Price Porky" recalls a 1938 Porky Pig cartoon that openly mocked the rise of fascism in Europe. The studio logos of Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer and United Productions of America appear on the left, as does the title of the Three Stooges' movie debut, Soup to Nuts. Basquiat divided these two halves with pitch-black pigment, within which a haunting white sword/cross hovers beneath the witty Bugs Bunny citation, "Arise, Sir Loin of Beef."

In no way does Basquiat disguise these inspirations. Indeed, his earliest artistic ambition had been to become a cartoonist, but he deliberately unlearned the technical perfection of his schoolboy drawings to develop an instinctive style unparalleled in its urgency. The artist's father Gerard Basquiat recalled that "Jean Michel painted all his life." From an early age, Basquiat had learned to lose himself happily in drawing, filling coloring book after coloring book and making copies of his favorite subjects and cartoon characters. By the time he was twenty and filmed in the movie New York Beat, drawing had clearly become a necessary and fundamental part of his being. As various scenes in this film demonstrate, words, images, phrases of all kinds flowed seamlessly and endlessly from his hand. This stream-of-consciousness delivery conjured up an eclectic range of sensory impressions. We live at the mercy of an age overloaded with imagery and information and Basquiat could not help but gather these fragments with an anthropological sense of wonder.

Job Analisis not only reflects an era shaped by the mass media, but also a savvy understanding of the history and nuances of art. Basquiat's stylistic influences are well known and clear. We can see the confident strokes of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline as well as the delicate lyricism of Twombly. He knew the power of Warhol's choice of popular culture icons and was familiar with William Burroughs' non-linear textual compositions. His art also draws on the improvisational nature of jazz, the sampling techniques of early New York hip-hop and the fierce energy of graffiti. All of these influences, and more, combine in various proportions to define a visual language uniquely Basquiat.

The written word above all dominates this painting, aggressive and rapid yet thoughtful and literate. Short phrases, sprawling sentences, and strings of numbers punctuate and activate the picture plane. Basquiat exploits the expressive effect of words to create a fast-paced rhythmic composition, much like the bebop music he passionately collected. He used them like brushstrokes, with as much finesse as his intuitive control of gesture and color. From the philosophic maxims of SAMO it is clear Basquiat knew the allusive quality of words and understood that they could convey emotional states pictorially. He borrows elements of everyday language (brand names, trademarks, instructions, and dialogue) that appear related, but never progress beyond raw expression and teasing suggestion. They are rich in references but their intention remains mysterious. Basquiat's friend Keith Haring felt the literary significance of his colleague's paintings was not yet fully appreciated. "His expertise at the assembling and disassembling of language has revealed new meanings to old words," Haring declared after Basquiat's death, "He used words like paint. He cut them, combined them, erased them, and rebuilt them. Every invention a new revelation" (K. Haring, in Jean-Michel Basquiat, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York, 1999, p.58).