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拍品專文
Signature textures, a bricolage of materials, images, and language arrests the viewer in Plaid, a raw juxtaposition of acrylic-saturated paper with iconic portraiture, decomposing drips, and primitive scrawl on canvas. Basquiat's improvisatory, accreted style forces our attention to this palimpsest, as if from some mysterious codex, scraped and re-inscribed, a layering of autobiographical memory, imbued with psychic intensity. Rendered with a spare, controlled linear line against intense hues, loaded burnt brown, grays, and milk whites a finely delineated face topped with a shock of black dreadlocks, a portrait-motif ubiquitous in Basquiat's oeuvre, the composition is balanced with elegant economy. The dynamic juxtaposition of abstraction and figurative styles utilizes an aesthetic vocabulary from an eclectic assortment of artists and art-historical movements, from which he references Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, Cy Twombly's calligraphic-style graffiti paintings, Enzo Cucchi and the Transvanguardia movement including Sandro Chia and Francesco Clemente, German neo-primitivist A.R. Penck, Anselm Kiefer and Robert Rauschenberg's mixed media strategies, California Funk artist William T. Wiley, and earlier models, such as the Art Brut of Jean Dubuffet, and the linearality of Picasso's portraiture.
The surface rhythm of loose, yet consonant gridded elements, the picture plane swathed in jerry-rigged paper sheets, Plaid captures the young artist in his stride. Historically, symbol of rebellion against the ruling class (The Dress Act of 1746 banned the use of Plaid by warrior clans), Basquiat may have liked its association with its revival in the anti-authoritarian punk fashion of the 1970s. In Plaid there is no actual criss-crossing of horizontal and vertical bands, but rather combinatorial, accreted images wreaking of psychic texturing. The arresting visage features downcast eyes, a glint of aggression, marking a realism in altercation with the boxed drips, which, saturated with layers of pigment built up from cobalt turquoise underpainting mixed with burnt sienna, titanium white, grays, and black ooze down the canvas.
Scrawled lines and lettering, an effect of Basquiat's purposeful contortion of his hand as he held his markers, reference abstraction and realism, play language against figuration, work collage against painterly abstraction, origins against the readymade, and straddle historical styles while offering a fond, if ironic critique. Basquiat's signature cryptic coding, plaid shirt, semi-realistic and like a pear, are crossed out, paradoxically, only to draw the viewer in, to make them read. Yet, Basquiat's own creole, a mode of street-action graffiti transferred to canvas, the glyph, part of Basquiat's eye rap, (Robert Storr, 200 Beats a Minute, in Jean-Michel Basquiat: Drawings, exh. cat., New York, Robert Miller Gallery, 1990, n.p.) could be lifted from an array of sources that include William Burroughs' glossary in Junky, the Symbol Sourcebook, compiled by Henry Dreyfuss, and Basquiat's own secret symbolic language, metabolized, transformed, and gleefully thrown onto canvas. References might range from the marker, the paintstick, to the drawn pear, possibly a casual a reference to Cezanne's Still Life with Skull (Nature morte au crane).
The unique structural support, begun in late 1982, creates a raw, spontaneity, the four strips of wood molding, crossed and tied at corners with twine, painting surface, canvas and paper, stretched over the bars, feels handmade, in the manner of tribal shields, and expressive of Basquiat's commitment to the assembled readymade, the constructed, in which one feels his raw and impulsive presence.
Thus, a self-identified mannerist style characterizes Basquiat's output, one loyal to his beginnings as a graffitist, committed not, as one may suppose, to a street art of anonymity, but rather to an auratic instantiation of the notion of an originating artist (R. Picard, "The Radiant Child,"Artforum: December 1981, p. 35-43).
By 1983, the year Plaid is executed, Basquiat, the lyrical poet, subversive graffitist and mesmerizing neo-expressionist, had shot to the apex of his tragically short career: he had already exhibited at Documenta VII in Kassel at the age of twenty-two, and would shortly be invited to participate in the Whitney Biennial in New York. Bruno Bischofberger would lure him away from his first gallery, Annina Nosei, to become his exclusive dealer and a second one-person exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles was on the horizon. This is also, the year Basquiat meets Andy Warhol, who catalyzes the young artist's creative energy, both as a mentor and a competitive spur to his productivity.
Sadly, the year of Plaid is the same year that the young New York graffiti artist Michael Stewart dies from asphyxiation and facial bruises at the hands of a group of all-white police officers. Basquiat memorializes this event in the painting Defacement (the Death of Michael Stewart), 1983. Could Plaid reify the empathic identification Basquiat felt with Stewart at this time? A relatively spare canvas, the texture raw, the linear delineation of the visage, eyes downturned, mouth bruised, teeth missing or in disarray, vigorous, eschewing the stylized primitivist scrawl and overt violence of bright hues, in order to bring to the fore, perhaps in effigy, the ubiquitous racism Basquiat never denied.
Holding the gaze with stark coloration, sensuous textures, biomorphic geometric staining, and a sense of the improvisatory, Basquiat has never been more psychically or emotionally alive than in this work. Plaid is restrained, yet vigorous, touching, yet menacing, a brilliant depiction of urban social complexity and painterly mastery.
The surface rhythm of loose, yet consonant gridded elements, the picture plane swathed in jerry-rigged paper sheets, Plaid captures the young artist in his stride. Historically, symbol of rebellion against the ruling class (The Dress Act of 1746 banned the use of Plaid by warrior clans), Basquiat may have liked its association with its revival in the anti-authoritarian punk fashion of the 1970s. In Plaid there is no actual criss-crossing of horizontal and vertical bands, but rather combinatorial, accreted images wreaking of psychic texturing. The arresting visage features downcast eyes, a glint of aggression, marking a realism in altercation with the boxed drips, which, saturated with layers of pigment built up from cobalt turquoise underpainting mixed with burnt sienna, titanium white, grays, and black ooze down the canvas.
Scrawled lines and lettering, an effect of Basquiat's purposeful contortion of his hand as he held his markers, reference abstraction and realism, play language against figuration, work collage against painterly abstraction, origins against the readymade, and straddle historical styles while offering a fond, if ironic critique. Basquiat's signature cryptic coding, plaid shirt, semi-realistic and like a pear, are crossed out, paradoxically, only to draw the viewer in, to make them read. Yet, Basquiat's own creole, a mode of street-action graffiti transferred to canvas, the glyph, part of Basquiat's eye rap, (Robert Storr, 200 Beats a Minute, in Jean-Michel Basquiat: Drawings, exh. cat., New York, Robert Miller Gallery, 1990, n.p.) could be lifted from an array of sources that include William Burroughs' glossary in Junky, the Symbol Sourcebook, compiled by Henry Dreyfuss, and Basquiat's own secret symbolic language, metabolized, transformed, and gleefully thrown onto canvas. References might range from the marker, the paintstick, to the drawn pear, possibly a casual a reference to Cezanne's Still Life with Skull (Nature morte au crane).
The unique structural support, begun in late 1982, creates a raw, spontaneity, the four strips of wood molding, crossed and tied at corners with twine, painting surface, canvas and paper, stretched over the bars, feels handmade, in the manner of tribal shields, and expressive of Basquiat's commitment to the assembled readymade, the constructed, in which one feels his raw and impulsive presence.
Thus, a self-identified mannerist style characterizes Basquiat's output, one loyal to his beginnings as a graffitist, committed not, as one may suppose, to a street art of anonymity, but rather to an auratic instantiation of the notion of an originating artist (R. Picard, "The Radiant Child,"Artforum: December 1981, p. 35-43).
By 1983, the year Plaid is executed, Basquiat, the lyrical poet, subversive graffitist and mesmerizing neo-expressionist, had shot to the apex of his tragically short career: he had already exhibited at Documenta VII in Kassel at the age of twenty-two, and would shortly be invited to participate in the Whitney Biennial in New York. Bruno Bischofberger would lure him away from his first gallery, Annina Nosei, to become his exclusive dealer and a second one-person exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles was on the horizon. This is also, the year Basquiat meets Andy Warhol, who catalyzes the young artist's creative energy, both as a mentor and a competitive spur to his productivity.
Sadly, the year of Plaid is the same year that the young New York graffiti artist Michael Stewart dies from asphyxiation and facial bruises at the hands of a group of all-white police officers. Basquiat memorializes this event in the painting Defacement (the Death of Michael Stewart), 1983. Could Plaid reify the empathic identification Basquiat felt with Stewart at this time? A relatively spare canvas, the texture raw, the linear delineation of the visage, eyes downturned, mouth bruised, teeth missing or in disarray, vigorous, eschewing the stylized primitivist scrawl and overt violence of bright hues, in order to bring to the fore, perhaps in effigy, the ubiquitous racism Basquiat never denied.
Holding the gaze with stark coloration, sensuous textures, biomorphic geometric staining, and a sense of the improvisatory, Basquiat has never been more psychically or emotionally alive than in this work. Plaid is restrained, yet vigorous, touching, yet menacing, a brilliant depiction of urban social complexity and painterly mastery.