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JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988) UNTITLED signed and dated

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JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988) UNTITLED signed and dated
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
(1960-1988)
UNTITLED
signed and dated
"Jean-Michel Basquiat 1982"
on the reverse of each panel
acrylic and oil-stick on plywood
diptych: 72 x 96 in.
(182.9 x 243.8 cm) overall
executed in 1982 <p>PROVENANCE
Annina Nosei Gallery, NEW YORK <p>EXHIBITED
NEW YORK, Annina Nosei Gallery, GROUP EXHIBITION,
December 18, 1982-January 6, 1983
Dallas Museum of Art, DALLAS COLLECTS JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, January 31-March 28, 1993 <p>LITERATURE
R. Cohen, ART NEWS, March 1983, p. 162 (illustrated).
G. Pfeffer-Levy, ed., JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, Galerie Enrico Navarra, PARIS, 2000, pp. 146-147, no. 4 (illustrated)
<p>With Basquiat's meteoric rise to art-world superstardom, the young painter quickly realized his goal: to make his mark, if quite literally, in New York City. Basquiat's experience as a graffiti artist certainly informed the pictorial idiom of his later paintings with their seemingly spontaneous, scrawl-like marks and creative combinations of words and images. Basquiat mixed his media with unbridled freedom, often combining painting, drawing, collage, and silkscreened images onto a single canvas. He absorbed a vast array of stylistic influences into his own signature idiom. He liberally quoted from the history of art, as well as drawing inspiration from the urban street culture. This sophisticated mixture of high and low sources is certainly apparent in UNTITLED, 1982. The spontaneous and energetic marks recall the techniques of Abstract Expressionism. The highly schematic treatment of both bodies and overall gestural marks recall the visual shorthand of graffiti, which Basquiat had practiced under the pseudonym SAMO during the late 1970s. It is explained that "Basquiat himself did not parody Abstract Expressionism, as Pop masters sometimes did. As he fused his sources, his mood was more complex: humor, play, mastery, and stylistic companionship. He brought into being first-generation (Franz Kline) and second-generation (Cy Twombly) Abstract Expressionist citations and mixed them up amiably with cartoon, graffitero, and other styles. In the process, he physicalized fused signs of erudition and amiability with his own invented break-pattern art, his own, uniquely arrived at, auto-bricolage" (R. Thompson, JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, NEW YORK, 1992, p. 36). Moreover, while Basquiat's tendency to repeat the same images in a painting using bright colors are reminiscent of a child's, Basquiat ultimately succeeds to translate the seemingly naive and childlike style into his own highly advanced one that challenges urban primitivism.
As Untitled, 1982, demonstrates, the human figure remained the central focus of Basquiat's paintings of 1982, and was not yet combined with the printed words and phrases that appeared in much of his later work. "Basquiat's career divides into three broad though overlapping phases, each characterized by a shift of style, subject matter, and reference. In the earliest, from 1980 to late 1982, Basquiat used painterly gestures on canvas, most often depicting skeletal figures and mask-like faces that signal his obsession with mortality, and imagery derived from his street existence, such as automobiles, buildings, police, children's sidewalk games, and graffiti.... He quickly abandoned the automobile and cityscape as subject, and introduced his unique depiction of man, specifically black man. Basquiat's early figures are frontal and flat, of stick-figure simplicity, and often partially reveal their internal skeleton and organs. Most pronounced is a halo or crown of thorns that lends the figures a superiority, specialness, and religious aura" (R. Marshall, ibid., pp. 15-16). Basquiat's aforementioned death obsession may be noted in the skull-like conception of both heads, with bony contours and deep sockets dramatically outlined in heavy oil stick. Indeed, both figures appear rather skeletal, and may be linked to a frequently cited incident from Basquiat's childhood. While recovering from an automobile accident at the age of seven, Basquiat's mother gave him a copy of Gray's Anatomy in order for him to understand which parts of the body were injured. Basquiat's careful, life-long study of this volume seems to have influenced his unique treatment of the human figure
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