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拍品專文
"Basquiat's great strength is his ability to merge his absorption of imagery from the streets, the newspapers, and TV with the spiritualism of his Haitian heritage, injecting both into a marvelously intuitive understanding of the language of modern painting"
Jeffrey Deitch, "Jean-Michel Basquiat: Annina Nosei," Flash Art, 16 May 1982, p. 50
Jean-Michel Basquiat's Untitled is an early example of the iconic loose and unencumbered painterly graphic style for which the artist is universally known. His subject matter includes provocatively positioned and layered imagery, iconography and text that address issues of race, culture, heritage and his personal biography. This work is a commanding, confident painting with forceful and expressive brushstrokes and uses the artist's complex and unique system of symbols to express his view of the world. Untitled triumphantly declares the energy and bravado of the then twenty-one year old man whose extraordinary career would soon dazzle the New York art world. In just under a decade, Basquiat would go from an often homeless bohemian, a child of New York City's underground music, art and club scene, to one of the world's most visible and discussed painters. Painted in 1981, Untitled is a work that serves to lay the groundwork for Basquiat's rapid rise to fame. Here, the artist references a variety of cultural phenomena such as cartoons and graffiti art, but the most potent reference in this work is the debris of his challenging youth. Basquiat's response to the deluge of social realities he faced was a barrage of images, text, symbols; materials that in composition and juxtaposition became part of his own unique pictorial syntax, a style instantly recognizable to the viewer.
Basquiat's early works from 1980-1981 are peppered with the car or ambulance as a recurrent thematic element. This imagery no doubt evolves from a painful event in the young life of the artist. In September 1968, when Basquiat was about 8, he was hit by a car while playing in the street. His arm was broken, he suffered severe internal injuries, and he eventually underwent a splenectomy. While he was recuperating from his injuries, his mother brought the precocious youngster the book Gray's Anatomy to keep him occupied. Flipping through the book during his convalescence, Basquiat encountered numerous anatomical drawings that would later influence his adult graphic style.
Basquiat's parents separated the same year as his accident and his father raised him and his sisters. The family resided in Brooklyn, for five years, then moved to Puerto Rico in 1974. After two years in San Juan, they returned to New York City. When Basquiat was 11, his mother was committed to a mental institution and thereafter spent time in and out of institutions. Running away from home at the age of 15, Basquiat slept on park benches in Washington Square Park, but was arrested and returned to the care of his father within a week. After Basquiat dropped out of Edward R. Murrow High School in the tenth grade, his father banished him from the household. Basquiat stayed with friends in Brooklyn and supported himself by selling T-shirts and homemade post cards. He also worked at the Unique Clothing Warehouse in West Broadway, Manhattan.
Much of the trauma of the artist's young life can be seen compressed into the imagery of Untitled from 1981. Here, an ideogrammatic car tilted slightly upward to indicate its speed zooms past a brown apartment building. The car is grounded in the lower right quadrant of the work against a patch of blood red paint splattered at the bottom with forceful brushstrokes. Anonymous masks peer out of the building's windows, stoically observing the scene below them. Are they his family or friends? In one window a gray shade is drawn, closed to the trauma below. On the wall of the apartment building to the left of the car Basquiat has etched letters, perhaps his own graffiti emblazoned on his building or the sounds of the ambulance that came to save the then young boy. These open vowels, 'AAA' add a layer of sound that adds to the urgency of the artist's own violent brushwork and the depicted narrative. To the left the artist has applied a thick layer of cloudlike pink and white, perhaps an allusion to the beyond, a softer place beyond the hard brown stone of the apartment building. The crown, another of Basquiat's signature motifs, also occurs in this composition. In some paintings the crowns top nameless generic figures or highlight heroes. In this work the crown holds place in a top floor window of the building as if to demarcate the artist's own residence. This abstract symbol of honor became a recurrent motif in his work and represents the autobiographical painting style of this young artist who would consistently chase his own demons in his art. Perhaps here he faces his own mortality head on, and forces us to engage with it as well.
With its dramatic narrative, this work possesses the urgency of the street combined with the primitive or childlike aesthetic characteristic of Jean Dubuffet's art brut. In a similar way to which this artist strived to create art that was free from culturally constructed aesthetics and traditional artistic conventions, Basquiat's position as an artiste maudit, or one living outside of accepted society, set him apart from other artist of his time. Free from the confines of traditional artistic production, he rebelled against the established and mainstream art world, and in doing so, he himself became the poster child for an entire generation of artists who positioned themselves against the status quo.
Jeffrey Deitch, "Jean-Michel Basquiat: Annina Nosei," Flash Art, 16 May 1982, p. 50
Jean-Michel Basquiat's Untitled is an early example of the iconic loose and unencumbered painterly graphic style for which the artist is universally known. His subject matter includes provocatively positioned and layered imagery, iconography and text that address issues of race, culture, heritage and his personal biography. This work is a commanding, confident painting with forceful and expressive brushstrokes and uses the artist's complex and unique system of symbols to express his view of the world. Untitled triumphantly declares the energy and bravado of the then twenty-one year old man whose extraordinary career would soon dazzle the New York art world. In just under a decade, Basquiat would go from an often homeless bohemian, a child of New York City's underground music, art and club scene, to one of the world's most visible and discussed painters. Painted in 1981, Untitled is a work that serves to lay the groundwork for Basquiat's rapid rise to fame. Here, the artist references a variety of cultural phenomena such as cartoons and graffiti art, but the most potent reference in this work is the debris of his challenging youth. Basquiat's response to the deluge of social realities he faced was a barrage of images, text, symbols; materials that in composition and juxtaposition became part of his own unique pictorial syntax, a style instantly recognizable to the viewer.
Basquiat's early works from 1980-1981 are peppered with the car or ambulance as a recurrent thematic element. This imagery no doubt evolves from a painful event in the young life of the artist. In September 1968, when Basquiat was about 8, he was hit by a car while playing in the street. His arm was broken, he suffered severe internal injuries, and he eventually underwent a splenectomy. While he was recuperating from his injuries, his mother brought the precocious youngster the book Gray's Anatomy to keep him occupied. Flipping through the book during his convalescence, Basquiat encountered numerous anatomical drawings that would later influence his adult graphic style.
Basquiat's parents separated the same year as his accident and his father raised him and his sisters. The family resided in Brooklyn, for five years, then moved to Puerto Rico in 1974. After two years in San Juan, they returned to New York City. When Basquiat was 11, his mother was committed to a mental institution and thereafter spent time in and out of institutions. Running away from home at the age of 15, Basquiat slept on park benches in Washington Square Park, but was arrested and returned to the care of his father within a week. After Basquiat dropped out of Edward R. Murrow High School in the tenth grade, his father banished him from the household. Basquiat stayed with friends in Brooklyn and supported himself by selling T-shirts and homemade post cards. He also worked at the Unique Clothing Warehouse in West Broadway, Manhattan.
Much of the trauma of the artist's young life can be seen compressed into the imagery of Untitled from 1981. Here, an ideogrammatic car tilted slightly upward to indicate its speed zooms past a brown apartment building. The car is grounded in the lower right quadrant of the work against a patch of blood red paint splattered at the bottom with forceful brushstrokes. Anonymous masks peer out of the building's windows, stoically observing the scene below them. Are they his family or friends? In one window a gray shade is drawn, closed to the trauma below. On the wall of the apartment building to the left of the car Basquiat has etched letters, perhaps his own graffiti emblazoned on his building or the sounds of the ambulance that came to save the then young boy. These open vowels, 'AAA' add a layer of sound that adds to the urgency of the artist's own violent brushwork and the depicted narrative. To the left the artist has applied a thick layer of cloudlike pink and white, perhaps an allusion to the beyond, a softer place beyond the hard brown stone of the apartment building. The crown, another of Basquiat's signature motifs, also occurs in this composition. In some paintings the crowns top nameless generic figures or highlight heroes. In this work the crown holds place in a top floor window of the building as if to demarcate the artist's own residence. This abstract symbol of honor became a recurrent motif in his work and represents the autobiographical painting style of this young artist who would consistently chase his own demons in his art. Perhaps here he faces his own mortality head on, and forces us to engage with it as well.
With its dramatic narrative, this work possesses the urgency of the street combined with the primitive or childlike aesthetic characteristic of Jean Dubuffet's art brut. In a similar way to which this artist strived to create art that was free from culturally constructed aesthetics and traditional artistic conventions, Basquiat's position as an artiste maudit, or one living outside of accepted society, set him apart from other artist of his time. Free from the confines of traditional artistic production, he rebelled against the established and mainstream art world, and in doing so, he himself became the poster child for an entire generation of artists who positioned themselves against the status quo.