NOT SOLD (BIDDING OVER)
0.00USD+ applicable fees & taxes.
This item WAS NOT SOLD. Auction date was 2003 Nov 13 @ 19:00UTC-5 : EST/CDT
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
(1961-1988)
MASQUE
signed "Jean-Michel Basquiat"
on the reverse
oil on canvas
56 x 491/4 in. (142.2 x 125 cm)
executed in 1982
this work is accompanied by a certificate issued by the Authentication Committee of the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat
ESTIMATE: $350,000-450,000
PROVENANCE
Galleria d'Arte Moderna, MODENA
Mathias Fels, PARIS
EXHIBITION
VIENNA, Kunsthauswien, JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, February 11-May 2, 1999, n.p. (illustrated)
KÜNZELSAU, Museum Würth, JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, October 6, 2001-January 2, 2002, p. 50 (illustrated)
LITERATURE
M. Angelou and S.J. Boyers, ed., LIFE DOESN'T FRIGHTEN ME,
p. 2 (illustrated)
J. Baal-Teshuva, JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, KÜNZELSAU, 2001,
p. 50 (illustrated)
Jean-Michel Basquiat was both the wild child and the crowned prince of the art community in New York during the 1980s. With his meteoric rise to art-world superstardom, the young painter quickly realized his initial 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 paintings with their seemingly spontaneous, scrawl-like marks and creative combinations of words and images, but these beginnings do not account for the astonishing, encyclopedic array of influences that the artist digested and delivered in his short, but stellar career. The myriad references that reverberate in his paintings reveal an extraordinary eclecticism and erudition, bridging low and high and incorporating aspects of street life alongside allusions to art history.
In his paintings of the early 1980s, Basquiat covered his canvases with bold, painterly gestures, most often depicting skeletal figures and masklike faces that signal his interest in mortality, race, and imagery derived from the street and contemporary culture of New York City. He evolved his own ambitious vocabulary of symbolic marks, subject and images, all derived from urban existence. It was also during this time that Basquiat introduced a number of his own images, including the crown and the copyright symbol. "The crown is Basquiat's own trademark as well as a symbol of respect and admiration that he bestows on the figures that populate his work" (E. Navarra, JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, PARIS, 2000, p. 27). In MASQUE, 1982, Basquiat paints a crown on the figure's head in an extremely pronounced manner, lending the masked figure a superiority, specialness and almost religious aura.
In his painting MASQUE, Basquiat does not paint the whole figure, but leaves it fragmented as a floating and disassociated part of the human body, poised between life and death, bodies and skeletons, heads and skulls. Such fragmented figuration is typical of Basquiat's early canvases, and the artist's preoccupation with such imagery has often been attributed to a childhood trauma: an automobile accident left him hospitalized, and his mother gave him a copy of Gray's Anatomy to occupy him during his recuperation. While this adolescent episode had an undeniable influence on his subsequent style, it is only one aspect of his painting's haunting iconography. In Basquiat's MASQUE, the figure is stranded somewhere between mutilation and martyrdom.
Auction Location:
United States
Previewing Details:
Saturday November 1, 2003 10am to 5pm
Sunday November 2, 2003 1Pm to 5pm
Monday November 3, 2003 10am to 5pm
Tuesday November 4, 2003 10am to 5pm
Wednesday November 5, 2003 10am to 5pm
Thursday November 6, 2003 10am to 5pm
Friday November 7, 2003 10am to 5pm
Saturday November 8, 2003 10am to 5pm
Sunday November 9, 2003 1Pm to 5pm
Monday November 10, 2003 10am to 5pm
Tuesday November 11, 2003 10am to 5pm
Wednesday November 12, 2003 10am to 5pm
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