Beschreibung:

Jean-Michel-Basquiat Untitled 1982 Acrylic and oil canvas. 182.9 x 106.7 cm. (72 x 42 in). Signed and dated ‘Jean-Michel Basquiat NYC 82' on the reverse.
Provenance Annina Nosei Gallery, New York; Pace Wildenstein, New York Exhibited New York, PaceWildenstein, Dubuffet and Basquiat: Personal Histories, 28 April – 17 June, 2006 Literature Exhibition Catalogue, PaceWildenstein, Dubuffet and Basquiat: Personal Histories, New York, 2006 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay Energetic, expressive, graphic, clandestine, streetwise, racial, all words used to describe the art and life of the seminal New York artist Jean Michel Basquiat. Originally a graffiti artist with the SAMO collective, the young Basquiat left his impression throughout the Manhattan art scene by managing to balance his social life and artistic practice within the urban environment, the bourgeoisie, and the closed circles of artists who were primarily white, a seemingly difficult circle to break into for a young black artist in the late 1970s early 1980s. The power of Basquiat's work is depicted as hieroglyphic, loosely written phrases or messages alight next to children-like drawings of skulls, automobiles and bones, dribbles of paint, marks and etchings made from all kinds of sources, largely decorative, racial and charged, his productions presented the public with a sort of naivety in painting but a surprising facility for creating artworks reflecting his position within the 80s world of rising youth culture meeting money, hype and excess, sadly in the future this world would also lead to his untimely death. Having received no formal art training, Basquiat never tried to deal with the ‘real' world through drawing; he could only scribble and jot, rehearsing his own stereotypes, his pictorial nouns for ‘face' or ‘body' over and over again. Consequently, though his images look quite vivid and sharp, and though from time to time he could bring off an intriguing passage of spiky marks or a brisk clash of blaring color, the work settles into a primitive and artsy puzzle, referent and aided by his admiration to older painters like Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet mimicking their techniques. As well as admiring the old masters he also toyed and drew sway from more classical and modern resources like Gray's Anatomy which includes detailed illustrations of the human body by Henry Gray and complimented with other corporal illustrations by Leonardo da Vinci The close approximation with these medical illustrations came after Basquiat was interned at a hospital at the age of 13, a result of being hit by a car and undergoing surgery to remove his spleen. One other influential title during his recovery period was Henry Dreyfuss', Symbol Sourcebook. First published in 1972 this book contains a variety of graphic symbols which Dreyfuss documented including one very important take on Hobos and their inter-personal lexicon which played close to Basquiat's under-privileged background. Some of these emblems communicate to other hobo's announcing locations like ‘the owner is in' or ‘well guarded house' thus becoming a supportive subterranean symbol-language born from urban centers onto the streets. The response Basquiat had to this was to develop his own personal symbols which we see responsive throughout his canvases like the recognizable crown, the copyright circle and various other scribbles which he repeats often. A productive year for the artist, 1982 saw Basquiat create perhaps his most notable relationships both with a then unknown singer called Madonna and a famed artist named Andy Warhol By this year he was sharing exhibition spaces with other New York talents like Julian Schnabel David Salle Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi thus becoming part of a loose-knit group that art-writers, curators, and collectors would soon be calling the Neo-expressionist movement. This momentum was characterized by an intense subjectivity of feeling and aggressively raw handling of materials, typical of Jean-Michel's style. His unification to this circle of creative's came about in early ‘82 when Jean-Michel-took the art world by storm with his rampag