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拍品专文
"With the exception of Picasso, few acclaimed painters of the 20th century invested the same time or energy to works on paper that is evidenced in their painting. The search for pictorial solutions would have been fought out in front of the canvas. Yes, 20th-century painters drew and made masterful works in this medium, but drawing was always a secondary concern. For Basquiat, in contrast, there is often less of a distinction, in terms of intent, between working on paper and on canvas." (F. Hoffman, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Drawing, exh. cat., Acquavella, New York, 2014, p. 33)
Executed in 1982, as Jean-Michel Basquiat reached the zenith of his meteoric rise to fame, Untitled (Jorr) belongs to a group of drawings that are absorbed in the physiognomy of the head. Frenetically achieved over the first part of that year, each unique personage in this cycle shares distinctive aesthetic similarities: a frontal perspective, bulging eyes, a set of bared, gnashing teeth. Realized on a sheet of white paper, which bears the marks of the artist’s frenzied studio environment, the portrait head in Untitled (Jorr) has a naïve quality, balanced between menace and humor, control and spontaneity. Silhouetted with feverish lines of teal, the features of the head come together with a deft economy of line, in contrast to the scratched out, barely legible words that surround it; “Sonny”, reads one phrase, “Jorr Jorr Jorr Jorr”, another. Despite the spontaneous execution of the composition, the artist’s hand is deliberate, his subject’s knitted brow, pockmarked face and frazzled hair rendered with impulsive, rapid gestures of oilstick in cherry red, purple and pastel yellow. Deconstructing conceptions of traditional portraiture, Untitled (Jorr) is entirely uninhibited, its frantic delivery a consummate example of the raw, graphic language that, during this period, propelled Basquiat from anonymous street artist to international superstar.
Since childhood, Basquiat was absorbed by the act of drawing, which formed the basis for all of his later endeavors as an artist; he would continue to bestow equal importance upon drawing and painting throughout his short, brilliant career. Unusually, his works on paper rival his painted oeuvre in both quality and quantity, and the years of 1982 and 1983 were the pinnacle of his graphic output, with the seminal head studies to which Untitled (Jorr) belongs making up a particularly meaningful body of work for the artist. Close friends of Basquiat, including Glenn O’Brien— the writer and member of Andy Warhol’s entourage at The Factory— and Suzanne Mallouk—known as the “Widow Basquiat”— recall him obsessively crouched over a sheet of paper with oilstick, pencil, or charcoal in hand, even when engaged in conversation, a clear indication of his desire to view the world through visual means first and foremost. As Dieter Buchhart has written, “on par with experiencing and reassuring oneself of one’s own everyday existence, the act of drawing was immensely important to Basquiat— in its own right, and not solely for its artistic outcome” (D. Buchhart, “A revolutionary caught between everyday life, knowledge, and myth,” Basquiat, exh. cat., Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2011, p. Xi). While traditionally a means of study or preparation, drawing for Basquiat was a medium that afforded him unlimited expressive possibilities— somewhere between automatism and an articulation of self— which enabled the free flow of thoughts and feelings direct from mind to page. Robert Storr notes, “Drawing, for him, was something you did rather than something done, an activity rather than a medium” (R. Storr, quoted in D. Buchhart, “A revolutionary caught between everyday life, knowledge, and myth”, Basquiat, exh. cat., Beyeler museum, Basel, 2011, p. Xi).
Human anatomy constitutes a significant element of Basquiat’s subject matter, not least in his drawings of 1982, which take the skull as their principal subject matter. The science of anatomy was of crucial importance to the artist, who had been hospitalized during his childhood after a car accident at the age of seven. During his recovery, he was gifted a copy of the medical textbook Gray’s Anatomy by his mother, which left a lasting impression on him and would serve as one of the most significant influences on the development of his highly idiosyncratic visual language. Although the artist was always concerned with the human body, Fred Hoffman comments, “as Basquiat’s career reached maturity at the early age of 21 in 1982, the artist more and more turned towards an investigation of the physiognomy as well as psychological make-up of those he knew and encountered” (F. Hoffman, Jean-Michel Basquiat Drawing: Works from the Schorr Family Collection, exh. cat., Acquavella, New York, 2014, p. 49). In Untitled (Jorr), the artist simultaneously renders the exterior and interior of his anonymous subject’s head, excavating his psyche for the viewer and evincing an unsettling trauma with frenetically overlapping lines and primal jolts of color. “What drew Basquiat almost obsessively to the depiction of the human head”, observes Hoffman, “was his fascination with the face as a passageway from exterior physical presence into the hidden realities of man’s psychological and mental realms” (F. Hoffman, Jean-Michel Basquiat Drawing: Works from the Schorr Family Collection, exh. cat., Acquavella, New York, 2014, p. 74). Floating, disembodied, against its white background, the head in Untitled (Jorr) is reminiscent of African sculpture, referencing the vocabulary of non-Western art forms adopted by Picasso in his cubist works. Mask-like, it both conceals the artist’s own suffering as he learned to live with his newfound celebrity, and reveals the expression of his soul at the height of his creative powers.
Executed in 1982, as Jean-Michel Basquiat reached the zenith of his meteoric rise to fame, Untitled (Jorr) belongs to a group of drawings that are absorbed in the physiognomy of the head. Frenetically achieved over the first part of that year, each unique personage in this cycle shares distinctive aesthetic similarities: a frontal perspective, bulging eyes, a set of bared, gnashing teeth. Realized on a sheet of white paper, which bears the marks of the artist’s frenzied studio environment, the portrait head in Untitled (Jorr) has a naïve quality, balanced between menace and humor, control and spontaneity. Silhouetted with feverish lines of teal, the features of the head come together with a deft economy of line, in contrast to the scratched out, barely legible words that surround it; “Sonny”, reads one phrase, “Jorr Jorr Jorr Jorr”, another. Despite the spontaneous execution of the composition, the artist’s hand is deliberate, his subject’s knitted brow, pockmarked face and frazzled hair rendered with impulsive, rapid gestures of oilstick in cherry red, purple and pastel yellow. Deconstructing conceptions of traditional portraiture, Untitled (Jorr) is entirely uninhibited, its frantic delivery a consummate example of the raw, graphic language that, during this period, propelled Basquiat from anonymous street artist to international superstar.
Since childhood, Basquiat was absorbed by the act of drawing, which formed the basis for all of his later endeavors as an artist; he would continue to bestow equal importance upon drawing and painting throughout his short, brilliant career. Unusually, his works on paper rival his painted oeuvre in both quality and quantity, and the years of 1982 and 1983 were the pinnacle of his graphic output, with the seminal head studies to which Untitled (Jorr) belongs making up a particularly meaningful body of work for the artist. Close friends of Basquiat, including Glenn O’Brien— the writer and member of Andy Warhol’s entourage at The Factory— and Suzanne Mallouk—known as the “Widow Basquiat”— recall him obsessively crouched over a sheet of paper with oilstick, pencil, or charcoal in hand, even when engaged in conversation, a clear indication of his desire to view the world through visual means first and foremost. As Dieter Buchhart has written, “on par with experiencing and reassuring oneself of one’s own everyday existence, the act of drawing was immensely important to Basquiat— in its own right, and not solely for its artistic outcome” (D. Buchhart, “A revolutionary caught between everyday life, knowledge, and myth,” Basquiat, exh. cat., Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2011, p. Xi). While traditionally a means of study or preparation, drawing for Basquiat was a medium that afforded him unlimited expressive possibilities— somewhere between automatism and an articulation of self— which enabled the free flow of thoughts and feelings direct from mind to page. Robert Storr notes, “Drawing, for him, was something you did rather than something done, an activity rather than a medium” (R. Storr, quoted in D. Buchhart, “A revolutionary caught between everyday life, knowledge, and myth”, Basquiat, exh. cat., Beyeler museum, Basel, 2011, p. Xi).
Human anatomy constitutes a significant element of Basquiat’s subject matter, not least in his drawings of 1982, which take the skull as their principal subject matter. The science of anatomy was of crucial importance to the artist, who had been hospitalized during his childhood after a car accident at the age of seven. During his recovery, he was gifted a copy of the medical textbook Gray’s Anatomy by his mother, which left a lasting impression on him and would serve as one of the most significant influences on the development of his highly idiosyncratic visual language. Although the artist was always concerned with the human body, Fred Hoffman comments, “as Basquiat’s career reached maturity at the early age of 21 in 1982, the artist more and more turned towards an investigation of the physiognomy as well as psychological make-up of those he knew and encountered” (F. Hoffman, Jean-Michel Basquiat Drawing: Works from the Schorr Family Collection, exh. cat., Acquavella, New York, 2014, p. 49). In Untitled (Jorr), the artist simultaneously renders the exterior and interior of his anonymous subject’s head, excavating his psyche for the viewer and evincing an unsettling trauma with frenetically overlapping lines and primal jolts of color. “What drew Basquiat almost obsessively to the depiction of the human head”, observes Hoffman, “was his fascination with the face as a passageway from exterior physical presence into the hidden realities of man’s psychological and mental realms” (F. Hoffman, Jean-Michel Basquiat Drawing: Works from the Schorr Family Collection, exh. cat., Acquavella, New York, 2014, p. 74). Floating, disembodied, against its white background, the head in Untitled (Jorr) is reminiscent of African sculpture, referencing the vocabulary of non-Western art forms adopted by Picasso in his cubist works. Mask-like, it both conceals the artist’s own suffering as he learned to live with his newfound celebrity, and reveals the expression of his soul at the height of his creative powers.