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Lot Essay
‘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)
Two totemic figures dominate the picture plane in this vibrant, emblematic work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, executed in a striking primary palette in the artist’s trademark oilstick medium. A larger, female figure is described with an almost Cubist arrangement of form: simultaneously depicted frontally and in profile, she wears an elaborate headpiece crowned with a single, bright yellow feather. The second figure is angular and robot-like. Adorned with a bright red nimbus of thorns, its large yellow eyes gleam like beacons. Along the lower edge the sheet is signed and inscribed in Basquiat’s unmistakable graphic scrawl. It was only recently that Basquiat—known initially as the enigmatic street artist SAMO—had taken to signing works with his real name. The present work was executed in 1982, the exhilarating and pivotal year that saw him rise to stardom. His debut solo show at the Annina Nosei Gallery in New York in March precipitated a string of international solo exhibitions across the year, and that summer he was the youngest artist to be included in curator Rudi Fuchs’s documenta VII.
Basquiat worked amid a ferment of life and art, and his studio brimmed with drawings, paintings, and source material. From this profusion of inspiration, quickfire images poured fully formed from his mind. Drawing—on paper or canvas—formed the basis of his practice, typically with oilstick. The medium’s slick, tacky sheen suited his bold visual lexicon. ‘His graphic ferocity’, suggests Peter Schjeldahl, ‘was tensile and plangent’ (P. Schjeldahl, ‘Jean-Michel Basquiat’, in Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings 1988-2018, New York, 2019, p. 39). There is an immediacy and intimacy to Basquiat’s works on paper, which frequently preserve the traces—coffee stains, footprints—of his daily life: ‘scarred, torn and trampled, much of his work on paper bears the direct imprint of his urgency’ (R. Storr, ‘Two Hundred Beats Per Minute’ in Basquiat Drawings, exh. cat. Robert Miller Gallery, New York 1990, n.p.).
Basquiat lifted ideas from art history, popular culture and religious iconography. He pored over the collection catalogues of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum, as well as books such as Burchard Brentjes’ African Rock Art (1969), often translating their idols and statuettes into his drawings. His oeuvre is replete with heroic imagery of crowns, halos, and masks, populated by archetypal images of royalty, athletes, warriors, and robots. Both figures in the present work are crowned in some way. One wears an elaborate plumed headpiece that crackles with electric lines, flying arrows, and antennae-like forms, like an exploding feathered war bonnet. For Basquiat crowns were ambiguous, even mocking: an allusion to the Western obsession with being on top, and the ease with which contemporary life could become a game of snakes and ladders. The brilliant red crown of thorns which adorns the second figure is a trademark motif in his work, emblematic of the weight of glory.
Basquiat was of Haitian and Puerto-Rican descent, and the present work—inscribed ‘ST MARTIN’—may be a tribute to the island of Saint Martin in the northeastern Caribbean Sea. Another inspiration may have been Saint Martin de Porres, the patron saint of social justice, racial harmony and mixed-race people. Born illegitimately in 1579 to a Spanish aristocrat and freed black slave, Saint Martin struggled to be accepted into a religious order in his home city of Lima. Persevering, he volunteered within a Dominican monastery and eventually became one of the few mixed-race Dominican brothers of the time, widely respected for his devotion and compassion. Canonised in 1962, two decades before the present work was executed, his life and work would have resonated with Basquiat, who was keenly aware of the complexities of colonial history and similarly concerned with the plight of social justice. Through works such as the present, Basquiat constructed a bold new visual realm in which to counter the inequalities and hypocrisies built into the fabric of twentieth-century America.
THE OLE FAARUP COLLECTION
‘I’ve got so much joy out of the art world, and I want to give it back’ (Ole Faarup)
The home of Ole Faarup was a modern-day Kunstkammer. From room to room, the walls were filled with paintings and the floors piled high with sculptures. This extraordinary, all-encompassing visual environment was a convivial setting for a collector who saw his artworks as a family, and appreciated being in their company every day. Among the most admired in Denmark, Faarup’s exceptional collection remains as testament to the vision and passion of its owner.
While it displays a distinctly Danish sensibility, the story of Faarup’s collection is international. His interest in art was sparked in 1960s New York, where he worked for the Danish design company Georg Jensen. Down the road from his office was the Museum of Modern Art. He began to spend his lunch-breaks among the museum’s masterpieces, and to develop the sharp, intuitive eye that would guide him for years to come.
After his return to Denmark the following decade—where he became director of Illums Bolighus, and later took over furniture retailer 3 Falke Møbler in Frederiksberg—Faarup began to build his collection, with an initial focus on homegrown artists. His first major purchase was Per Kirkeby’s Skovsøen (Lake Forest) (1970), which he kept for the rest of his life. Further highlights among the collection’s Danish names include Ejler Bille, Tal R, Asger Jorn and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba.
Some other early acquisitions, however, made way for newer art by younger artists. The collection was in constant motion, active and engaged with the present moment. Faarup had a superb sense of intuition and collected many major artists early in their careers. These included many Young British Artists of the 1990s—Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Grayson Perry, Tracey Emin, Gavin Turk, Sarah Lucas, Noble & Webster—and, during the same decade, the painters Peter Doig and Chris Ofili. Ofili’s Blossom (1997) and Doig’s Country Rock (1998-1999) stand out among their most iconic and celebrated works, and have graced the catalogue covers of major museum exhibitions to which Faarup lent them.
Amid works that hail from many different countries, a grouping of paintings and sculptures from Germany also emerges as a strong vein in the collection. Faarup’s early purchase of a work by Jean-Michel Basquiat—then an artist little-known in Denmark—is yet another example of his forward-looking vision. In more recent years, he acquired works by the up-and-coming Italian artist Guglielmo Castelli, the Cameroonian Pascale Marthine Tayou, and the Polish neo-surrealist Ewa Juszkiewicz. Faarup retained his strong interest in contemporary Danish art, too, forging a close relationship with the rising star Esben Weile Kjær.
Faarup never bought art for the sake of investment, but rather was guided by his own personal emotive responses. He also placed great importance upon meeting the artists whose work he owned, recalling memorable encounters with Doig and Ofili, with Ejler Bille, and with Warhol at Max’s Kansas City in New York. Something of an artist’s soul, he believed, resided in their work. Indeed, it is the capacity to convey another human view of the world—whether it thrills and quickens the pulse, or offers an escape from the noise of day-to-day life—that gives art its power, beauty and integrity.
Living among these artworks as his intimate companions, it is little wonder that Faarup regarded his collection with such warmth. With his legacy, he set out to create a fund through which museums can acquire new works by young Danish artists. The Ole Faarup Art Foundation will share his joy with others, and leave his country’s artistic lifeblood all the stronger. While his collection represents more than half a century of deeply-felt passion for art, Ole Faarup always had an intelligent eye fixed firmly on the future.
Two totemic figures dominate the picture plane in this vibrant, emblematic work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, executed in a striking primary palette in the artist’s trademark oilstick medium. A larger, female figure is described with an almost Cubist arrangement of form: simultaneously depicted frontally and in profile, she wears an elaborate headpiece crowned with a single, bright yellow feather. The second figure is angular and robot-like. Adorned with a bright red nimbus of thorns, its large yellow eyes gleam like beacons. Along the lower edge the sheet is signed and inscribed in Basquiat’s unmistakable graphic scrawl. It was only recently that Basquiat—known initially as the enigmatic street artist SAMO—had taken to signing works with his real name. The present work was executed in 1982, the exhilarating and pivotal year that saw him rise to stardom. His debut solo show at the Annina Nosei Gallery in New York in March precipitated a string of international solo exhibitions across the year, and that summer he was the youngest artist to be included in curator Rudi Fuchs’s documenta VII.
Basquiat worked amid a ferment of life and art, and his studio brimmed with drawings, paintings, and source material. From this profusion of inspiration, quickfire images poured fully formed from his mind. Drawing—on paper or canvas—formed the basis of his practice, typically with oilstick. The medium’s slick, tacky sheen suited his bold visual lexicon. ‘His graphic ferocity’, suggests Peter Schjeldahl, ‘was tensile and plangent’ (P. Schjeldahl, ‘Jean-Michel Basquiat’, in Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings 1988-2018, New York, 2019, p. 39). There is an immediacy and intimacy to Basquiat’s works on paper, which frequently preserve the traces—coffee stains, footprints—of his daily life: ‘scarred, torn and trampled, much of his work on paper bears the direct imprint of his urgency’ (R. Storr, ‘Two Hundred Beats Per Minute’ in Basquiat Drawings, exh. cat. Robert Miller Gallery, New York 1990, n.p.).
Basquiat lifted ideas from art history, popular culture and religious iconography. He pored over the collection catalogues of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the British Museum, as well as books such as Burchard Brentjes’ African Rock Art (1969), often translating their idols and statuettes into his drawings. His oeuvre is replete with heroic imagery of crowns, halos, and masks, populated by archetypal images of royalty, athletes, warriors, and robots. Both figures in the present work are crowned in some way. One wears an elaborate plumed headpiece that crackles with electric lines, flying arrows, and antennae-like forms, like an exploding feathered war bonnet. For Basquiat crowns were ambiguous, even mocking: an allusion to the Western obsession with being on top, and the ease with which contemporary life could become a game of snakes and ladders. The brilliant red crown of thorns which adorns the second figure is a trademark motif in his work, emblematic of the weight of glory.
Basquiat was of Haitian and Puerto-Rican descent, and the present work—inscribed ‘ST MARTIN’—may be a tribute to the island of Saint Martin in the northeastern Caribbean Sea. Another inspiration may have been Saint Martin de Porres, the patron saint of social justice, racial harmony and mixed-race people. Born illegitimately in 1579 to a Spanish aristocrat and freed black slave, Saint Martin struggled to be accepted into a religious order in his home city of Lima. Persevering, he volunteered within a Dominican monastery and eventually became one of the few mixed-race Dominican brothers of the time, widely respected for his devotion and compassion. Canonised in 1962, two decades before the present work was executed, his life and work would have resonated with Basquiat, who was keenly aware of the complexities of colonial history and similarly concerned with the plight of social justice. Through works such as the present, Basquiat constructed a bold new visual realm in which to counter the inequalities and hypocrisies built into the fabric of twentieth-century America.
THE OLE FAARUP COLLECTION
‘I’ve got so much joy out of the art world, and I want to give it back’ (Ole Faarup)
The home of Ole Faarup was a modern-day Kunstkammer. From room to room, the walls were filled with paintings and the floors piled high with sculptures. This extraordinary, all-encompassing visual environment was a convivial setting for a collector who saw his artworks as a family, and appreciated being in their company every day. Among the most admired in Denmark, Faarup’s exceptional collection remains as testament to the vision and passion of its owner.
While it displays a distinctly Danish sensibility, the story of Faarup’s collection is international. His interest in art was sparked in 1960s New York, where he worked for the Danish design company Georg Jensen. Down the road from his office was the Museum of Modern Art. He began to spend his lunch-breaks among the museum’s masterpieces, and to develop the sharp, intuitive eye that would guide him for years to come.
After his return to Denmark the following decade—where he became director of Illums Bolighus, and later took over furniture retailer 3 Falke Møbler in Frederiksberg—Faarup began to build his collection, with an initial focus on homegrown artists. His first major purchase was Per Kirkeby’s Skovsøen (Lake Forest) (1970), which he kept for the rest of his life. Further highlights among the collection’s Danish names include Ejler Bille, Tal R, Asger Jorn and Sonja Ferlov Mancoba.
Some other early acquisitions, however, made way for newer art by younger artists. The collection was in constant motion, active and engaged with the present moment. Faarup had a superb sense of intuition and collected many major artists early in their careers. These included many Young British Artists of the 1990s—Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Grayson Perry, Tracey Emin, Gavin Turk, Sarah Lucas, Noble & Webster—and, during the same decade, the painters Peter Doig and Chris Ofili. Ofili’s Blossom (1997) and Doig’s Country Rock (1998-1999) stand out among their most iconic and celebrated works, and have graced the catalogue covers of major museum exhibitions to which Faarup lent them.
Amid works that hail from many different countries, a grouping of paintings and sculptures from Germany also emerges as a strong vein in the collection. Faarup’s early purchase of a work by Jean-Michel Basquiat—then an artist little-known in Denmark—is yet another example of his forward-looking vision. In more recent years, he acquired works by the up-and-coming Italian artist Guglielmo Castelli, the Cameroonian Pascale Marthine Tayou, and the Polish neo-surrealist Ewa Juszkiewicz. Faarup retained his strong interest in contemporary Danish art, too, forging a close relationship with the rising star Esben Weile Kjær.
Faarup never bought art for the sake of investment, but rather was guided by his own personal emotive responses. He also placed great importance upon meeting the artists whose work he owned, recalling memorable encounters with Doig and Ofili, with Ejler Bille, and with Warhol at Max’s Kansas City in New York. Something of an artist’s soul, he believed, resided in their work. Indeed, it is the capacity to convey another human view of the world—whether it thrills and quickens the pulse, or offers an escape from the noise of day-to-day life—that gives art its power, beauty and integrity.
Living among these artworks as his intimate companions, it is little wonder that Faarup regarded his collection with such warmth. With his legacy, he set out to create a fund through which museums can acquire new works by young Danish artists. The Ole Faarup Art Foundation will share his joy with others, and leave his country’s artistic lifeblood all the stronger. While his collection represents more than half a century of deeply-felt passion for art, Ole Faarup always had an intelligent eye fixed firmly on the future.