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Lot Essay
'Haloes Fifty-Nine cents'
Untitled was painted in 1982, the year that Jean Michel Basquiat first arrived on the international art stage as the new, enigmatic and much-talked-about wunderkind of New York contemporary art. Forming the apex of the artist's all-too-brief career, the year 1982 was a period when Basquiat, still energised, enthusiastic and hungry for success, was firing on all cylinders, rapidly creating the body of work by which much of his career would later be judged. Only a year before Basquiat had been living at random addresses in Downtown New York, playing for the band Gray at the Mudd Club and working as a street artist under the tag of SAMO. The translation of his art onto canvas and the transformation of SAMO into 'Jean-Michel Basquiat art star' or what Robert Hughes once described as the 'little black Rimbaud' of the New York scene were coincident with the making of this painting.
In 1982 Basquiat's art was developing and expanding as rapidly as his career. Almost always autobiographical in some way, Basquiat's highly individualistic way of painting clearly paralleled and reflected the rapid changes he was going through at this time. This untitled painting belongs amongst a series of Basquiat's most important works from 1982 depicting saintly hero figures - boxers, athletes and prophets - all with an overridingly tragic sense of majesty and grandeur. 'Most Young Kings get their Heads cut off' Basquiat famously wrote, and, if one follows the progress of the artist's career, a sense that the artist was talking to himself through his work, exorcising demons, exposing uncomfortable truths and trying to explain the way of things to himself, becomes increasingly pronounced. By the mid-1980s, Basquiat's by now deliberately disjointed art, reflected his increasing sense of paranoia and isolation, echoing the loneliness of his drug-dependent celebrity lifestyle as the world's first internationally-recognised black artist. Lost, like some hobo wandering in a shallow and alien world of fame and fake glamour, Basquiat's paintings seem to leave warning signs for himself and others, scrawled and hanging in the finest galleries of the world. 'Nothing to be gained here' is often their refrain.
These warnings to himself and others were always apparent in his art, and probably grew out of the biting social commentary that often informed his work as SAMO. In his early series of hero paintings, such as Untitled, the isolation of the lone black hero is clearly apparent in the tortured and expressive way in which these striking and enigmatic figures are rendered. The freshness, child-like ferocity and raw untutored energy of Basquiat's brushwork is what lends these works much of their power, but also much of their nervousness and persuasive sense of the artist's own personal ambivalence towards his rapidly achieved success. These totemic icons are, like Basquiat himself was to become, both hero and victim. Though often based on Basquiat's own personal pantheon of heroes and substitute father figures - a series that ranged from black American athletes, Joe Louis and Hank Aaron to Marcus Garvey, Jimi Hendrix or Charlie Parker, they are, of course projected self-images. Timeless and archetypal they signify the lone tragic warrior, the mythical hero of legend setting out alone in an alien and predominantly urban world. Like the product of a bad acid trip on Sesame street, this vital and fearsome figure appears again and again from the depths of Basquiat's unconscious emerging, as in this work, as if by magic, conjured, from the seemingly random and dramatic abstract splashes of paint.
Painted in gold - the colour of royalty - and seemingly assembled from the raw accidental marks and crude graphic elements of graffiti and street art, this figure, surmounted with a halo is the epitome of Basquiat's famous declaration that the subject matter of his art was, 'royalty, heroism and the streets.' Arising in his work at precisely the same time as Basquiat himself emerged from the streets onto the international art scene, it is hard not to see in this figure as in others like it, a prophetic self-portrait of the young Basquiat as an apparition and modern urban phenomenon. Adorned with a halo he is both warrior-hero and saint, both a demon and a martyr, an icon, scapegoat and sacrificial victim of the modern art world.
Untitled was painted in 1982, the year that Jean Michel Basquiat first arrived on the international art stage as the new, enigmatic and much-talked-about wunderkind of New York contemporary art. Forming the apex of the artist's all-too-brief career, the year 1982 was a period when Basquiat, still energised, enthusiastic and hungry for success, was firing on all cylinders, rapidly creating the body of work by which much of his career would later be judged. Only a year before Basquiat had been living at random addresses in Downtown New York, playing for the band Gray at the Mudd Club and working as a street artist under the tag of SAMO. The translation of his art onto canvas and the transformation of SAMO into 'Jean-Michel Basquiat art star' or what Robert Hughes once described as the 'little black Rimbaud' of the New York scene were coincident with the making of this painting.
In 1982 Basquiat's art was developing and expanding as rapidly as his career. Almost always autobiographical in some way, Basquiat's highly individualistic way of painting clearly paralleled and reflected the rapid changes he was going through at this time. This untitled painting belongs amongst a series of Basquiat's most important works from 1982 depicting saintly hero figures - boxers, athletes and prophets - all with an overridingly tragic sense of majesty and grandeur. 'Most Young Kings get their Heads cut off' Basquiat famously wrote, and, if one follows the progress of the artist's career, a sense that the artist was talking to himself through his work, exorcising demons, exposing uncomfortable truths and trying to explain the way of things to himself, becomes increasingly pronounced. By the mid-1980s, Basquiat's by now deliberately disjointed art, reflected his increasing sense of paranoia and isolation, echoing the loneliness of his drug-dependent celebrity lifestyle as the world's first internationally-recognised black artist. Lost, like some hobo wandering in a shallow and alien world of fame and fake glamour, Basquiat's paintings seem to leave warning signs for himself and others, scrawled and hanging in the finest galleries of the world. 'Nothing to be gained here' is often their refrain.
These warnings to himself and others were always apparent in his art, and probably grew out of the biting social commentary that often informed his work as SAMO. In his early series of hero paintings, such as Untitled, the isolation of the lone black hero is clearly apparent in the tortured and expressive way in which these striking and enigmatic figures are rendered. The freshness, child-like ferocity and raw untutored energy of Basquiat's brushwork is what lends these works much of their power, but also much of their nervousness and persuasive sense of the artist's own personal ambivalence towards his rapidly achieved success. These totemic icons are, like Basquiat himself was to become, both hero and victim. Though often based on Basquiat's own personal pantheon of heroes and substitute father figures - a series that ranged from black American athletes, Joe Louis and Hank Aaron to Marcus Garvey, Jimi Hendrix or Charlie Parker, they are, of course projected self-images. Timeless and archetypal they signify the lone tragic warrior, the mythical hero of legend setting out alone in an alien and predominantly urban world. Like the product of a bad acid trip on Sesame street, this vital and fearsome figure appears again and again from the depths of Basquiat's unconscious emerging, as in this work, as if by magic, conjured, from the seemingly random and dramatic abstract splashes of paint.
Painted in gold - the colour of royalty - and seemingly assembled from the raw accidental marks and crude graphic elements of graffiti and street art, this figure, surmounted with a halo is the epitome of Basquiat's famous declaration that the subject matter of his art was, 'royalty, heroism and the streets.' Arising in his work at precisely the same time as Basquiat himself emerged from the streets onto the international art scene, it is hard not to see in this figure as in others like it, a prophetic self-portrait of the young Basquiat as an apparition and modern urban phenomenon. Adorned with a halo he is both warrior-hero and saint, both a demon and a martyr, an icon, scapegoat and sacrificial victim of the modern art world.