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Lot Essay
He was a painter, but he was also a rock star. He wanted to blow minds the way Miles Davis and John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix did. He wanted to take Picasso’s African mask-inspired visions and blast them with the blues. —— Glenn O’Brien
Sabado por la Noche (Saturday Night) (1984) is a vibrant and multi-layered work that represents an important period in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s career. Across a vast canvas layered with acrylic, oilstick silkscreen and paper collage, the artist brings together text, icons and human figures. Brilliant swathes of magenta, yellow and emerald green structure the composition, which is dominated by two mask-like ‘griot’ heads that relate to those seen in several major works from the same year, including Gold Griot (The Broad, Los Angeles) and Grillo (Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris). Embedded sheets of paper are scrawled with symbols relating to the solar system, Fibonacci’s golden ratio, ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’, and ‘birth’, and doubled gyres and spirals. A third mask-like head, submerged in pink to the lower left, dreams forth a trio of female forms amid an aura of red, green and gold: the colours of the Pan-African flag. While these details reflect Basquiat’s increasing interest in African spiritualism and history, other elements reflect different influences, such as a cartoonish wolf-head brandished by the rightmost figure, and a silkscreened comic-strip boxing scene (‘BIP!’), which reproduces one of the artist’s own drawings in reverse. In Sabado por la Noche, Basquiat brings a bounty of ideas and techniques into luminous conversation.
1984 was a pivotal year for Basquiat. He had moved into a loft space owned by Andy Warhol in August 1983, and the two artists made their first collaborative works in silkscreen and paint shortly afterwards. As he continued his dialogue with Warhol over the following two years, Basquiat’s own work took on a greater material richness and thematic complexity. Crowning his ascent to global fame, August 1984 saw the opening of Basquiat’s first solo museum show, which debuted at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, before travelling to London’s Institute of Contemporary Art.
His hand was swift and sure. The images that trailed behind it crackled and exploded like fireworks shot from the back of a speeding flatbed truck. —— Robert Storr
In West Africa, a griot is a poet-storyteller who plays a central role in his community’s oral tradition. Basquiat’s griots, their features electric with bright lines of oilstick, show the influence of idols illustrated in Robert Farris Thompson’s book Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy (1983). Basquiat was likely introduced to Flash of the Spirit by his friend Shenge Ka Pharaoh, who became an assistant in 1984. He was so enamoured with the book that he asked Thompson to contribute a catalogue essay for a 1985 solo show in New York. Drawing a musical or vocal equivalence between Basquiat’s work and the magic of a voodoo shaman, Thompson identified the artist as displaying a postmodern ‘Creole’ sensibility, enthusing that ‘He transforms paint into incantation … He chants paint. He chants body. He chants them in splendid repetitions’ (R. F. Thompson, Jean-Michel Basquiat: 2 March – 23 March 1985, exh. cat. Mary Boone / Michael Werner Gallery, New York 1985, n.p.).
The griot masks in Sabado por la Noche, awash in sweeping gestural brushwork, are an instance of different artistic languages coming together: African cultural forms meeting the colour of Abstract Expressionism, which remained enormously influential in Basquiat’s New York. The work’s Spanish title also tells a polyvocal story. Having grown up in a multilingual Haitian-Puerto Rican household, Basquiat was fluent in Spanish and often used the language in his works. Elsewhere, diagrammatic evocations of esoteric knowledge and sacred geometry speak to his fascination with encyclopaedias, symbol sourcebooks and other literature, sitting alongside images that evoke the everyday imagery of TV cartoons and comic-books. Basquiat sampled and synthesised ideas from a dizzying array of fields, assembling them onto one vibrant plane.
As with many of the faces that fill Basquiat’s most celebrated works, it is tempting to search for elements of self-portraiture in Sabado por la Noche. Otherworldly and glowing, the masks’ bright lineation hints at skeleton and muscle beneath the skin. Many of Basquiat’s faces become skulls—a key early influence was the medical textbook Gray’s Anatomy and a book of anatomical drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, which he had been given while in hospital as a child—and can evoke themes of mortality. The present work’s faces, however, appear alive with a spiritual and celebratory power. If Basquiat did see himself in the griot’s guise, he was perhaps here depicting himself as a multiform painter-troubadour, spinning ambiguous and many-layered stories between internal and external worlds.
Basquiat has organised not only a diversity of materials into art, but also heterogeneous pictorial and linguistic elements, which are encyclopedic in range but also deeply personal. —— Demosthenes Davvetas
Discussing his use of African imagery, Basquiat said ‘I’ve never been to Africa. I’m an artist who has been influenced by his New York environment. But I have a cultural memory. I don’t need to look for it; it exists. It’s over there, in Africa. That doesn’t mean that I have to go live there. Our cultural memory follows us everywhere, wherever you live’ (J-M. Basquiat, quoted in D. Davvetas, ‘Jean-Michel Basquiat’, New Art International, October-November 1988, p. lxiii). Indeed, works like Sabado por la Noche are less immediately about the artist’s personal identity than they are reflective of the mutable, hybrid nature of contemporary culture at large. New York was the centre of Basquiat’s life and art: a whirlwind of visual and aural information where everything was available, and where the influences of voodoo and TV advertisements, Picasso and subway art, da Vinci and Warhol could meet on equal footing. His works were vessels into which he poured images and words, cataloguing and juxtaposing what he saw to craft rich visual lyrics like a griot of the Lower East Side.
The diversity of media in Sabado por la Noche—drawn, painted, collaged, silkscreened—matches its range of ideas. Basquiat’s mastery lies in his quickfire and seemingly effortless process of selection and composition: for all its density and multiplicity, the canvas is neither overwhelmed or unbalanced. The artist deploys colour and form with an instinctive grace. Bravado brushwork, mysterious glyphs and powerful human figures sing in harmony. As Demosthenes Davvetas has written, Basquiat’s work ‘is less like a mirror than like an eye and a voice: as eye, it observes and interprets life, collecting selected items and organising them within itself; thus organised, it becomes voice, a clear utterance expressing what has been seen’ (D. Davvetas, ‘Lines, Chapters and Verses: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat’, in E. Navarra, ed., Jean-Michel Basquiat, 3rd ed., Paris 2000, p. 59).
Sabado por la Noche (Saturday Night) (1984) is a vibrant and multi-layered work that represents an important period in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s career. Across a vast canvas layered with acrylic, oilstick silkscreen and paper collage, the artist brings together text, icons and human figures. Brilliant swathes of magenta, yellow and emerald green structure the composition, which is dominated by two mask-like ‘griot’ heads that relate to those seen in several major works from the same year, including Gold Griot (The Broad, Los Angeles) and Grillo (Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris). Embedded sheets of paper are scrawled with symbols relating to the solar system, Fibonacci’s golden ratio, ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’, and ‘birth’, and doubled gyres and spirals. A third mask-like head, submerged in pink to the lower left, dreams forth a trio of female forms amid an aura of red, green and gold: the colours of the Pan-African flag. While these details reflect Basquiat’s increasing interest in African spiritualism and history, other elements reflect different influences, such as a cartoonish wolf-head brandished by the rightmost figure, and a silkscreened comic-strip boxing scene (‘BIP!’), which reproduces one of the artist’s own drawings in reverse. In Sabado por la Noche, Basquiat brings a bounty of ideas and techniques into luminous conversation.
1984 was a pivotal year for Basquiat. He had moved into a loft space owned by Andy Warhol in August 1983, and the two artists made their first collaborative works in silkscreen and paint shortly afterwards. As he continued his dialogue with Warhol over the following two years, Basquiat’s own work took on a greater material richness and thematic complexity. Crowning his ascent to global fame, August 1984 saw the opening of Basquiat’s first solo museum show, which debuted at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, before travelling to London’s Institute of Contemporary Art.
His hand was swift and sure. The images that trailed behind it crackled and exploded like fireworks shot from the back of a speeding flatbed truck. —— Robert Storr
In West Africa, a griot is a poet-storyteller who plays a central role in his community’s oral tradition. Basquiat’s griots, their features electric with bright lines of oilstick, show the influence of idols illustrated in Robert Farris Thompson’s book Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy (1983). Basquiat was likely introduced to Flash of the Spirit by his friend Shenge Ka Pharaoh, who became an assistant in 1984. He was so enamoured with the book that he asked Thompson to contribute a catalogue essay for a 1985 solo show in New York. Drawing a musical or vocal equivalence between Basquiat’s work and the magic of a voodoo shaman, Thompson identified the artist as displaying a postmodern ‘Creole’ sensibility, enthusing that ‘He transforms paint into incantation … He chants paint. He chants body. He chants them in splendid repetitions’ (R. F. Thompson, Jean-Michel Basquiat: 2 March – 23 March 1985, exh. cat. Mary Boone / Michael Werner Gallery, New York 1985, n.p.).
The griot masks in Sabado por la Noche, awash in sweeping gestural brushwork, are an instance of different artistic languages coming together: African cultural forms meeting the colour of Abstract Expressionism, which remained enormously influential in Basquiat’s New York. The work’s Spanish title also tells a polyvocal story. Having grown up in a multilingual Haitian-Puerto Rican household, Basquiat was fluent in Spanish and often used the language in his works. Elsewhere, diagrammatic evocations of esoteric knowledge and sacred geometry speak to his fascination with encyclopaedias, symbol sourcebooks and other literature, sitting alongside images that evoke the everyday imagery of TV cartoons and comic-books. Basquiat sampled and synthesised ideas from a dizzying array of fields, assembling them onto one vibrant plane.
As with many of the faces that fill Basquiat’s most celebrated works, it is tempting to search for elements of self-portraiture in Sabado por la Noche. Otherworldly and glowing, the masks’ bright lineation hints at skeleton and muscle beneath the skin. Many of Basquiat’s faces become skulls—a key early influence was the medical textbook Gray’s Anatomy and a book of anatomical drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, which he had been given while in hospital as a child—and can evoke themes of mortality. The present work’s faces, however, appear alive with a spiritual and celebratory power. If Basquiat did see himself in the griot’s guise, he was perhaps here depicting himself as a multiform painter-troubadour, spinning ambiguous and many-layered stories between internal and external worlds.
Basquiat has organised not only a diversity of materials into art, but also heterogeneous pictorial and linguistic elements, which are encyclopedic in range but also deeply personal. —— Demosthenes Davvetas
Discussing his use of African imagery, Basquiat said ‘I’ve never been to Africa. I’m an artist who has been influenced by his New York environment. But I have a cultural memory. I don’t need to look for it; it exists. It’s over there, in Africa. That doesn’t mean that I have to go live there. Our cultural memory follows us everywhere, wherever you live’ (J-M. Basquiat, quoted in D. Davvetas, ‘Jean-Michel Basquiat’, New Art International, October-November 1988, p. lxiii). Indeed, works like Sabado por la Noche are less immediately about the artist’s personal identity than they are reflective of the mutable, hybrid nature of contemporary culture at large. New York was the centre of Basquiat’s life and art: a whirlwind of visual and aural information where everything was available, and where the influences of voodoo and TV advertisements, Picasso and subway art, da Vinci and Warhol could meet on equal footing. His works were vessels into which he poured images and words, cataloguing and juxtaposing what he saw to craft rich visual lyrics like a griot of the Lower East Side.
The diversity of media in Sabado por la Noche—drawn, painted, collaged, silkscreened—matches its range of ideas. Basquiat’s mastery lies in his quickfire and seemingly effortless process of selection and composition: for all its density and multiplicity, the canvas is neither overwhelmed or unbalanced. The artist deploys colour and form with an instinctive grace. Bravado brushwork, mysterious glyphs and powerful human figures sing in harmony. As Demosthenes Davvetas has written, Basquiat’s work ‘is less like a mirror than like an eye and a voice: as eye, it observes and interprets life, collecting selected items and organising them within itself; thus organised, it becomes voice, a clear utterance expressing what has been seen’ (D. Davvetas, ‘Lines, Chapters and Verses: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat’, in E. Navarra, ed., Jean-Michel Basquiat, 3rd ed., Paris 2000, p. 59).