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Lot Essay
Painted in 1981 in the year of Basquiat's transition from street artist SAMO to future art star Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Bip) with its deliberately raw, energised and child-like cartoon imagery is a work that knowingly represents a challenge to the lofty intellectual atmosphere of the 1970s New York contemporary art world.
'The art world was mostly Minimal when I came up' Basquiat once recalled, 'I thought it alienated people from art. It seemed very college.' The intellectualism and precious exclusivity of the New York art world alongside the prolonged economic recession of the 1970s had led to the development of an increasingly visible gap between rich and poor and in Manhattan as well as between uptown and downtown neighbourhoods. When graffiti art, which had arisen and evolved into an exciting underground culture on the city's subways was brought into the gallery circuit in the early 1980s, it was a much-needed antidote to the dry Minimalist-Conceptual aesthetic that had previously dominated. Losing some of its energy and validity by becoming a chic and saleable product on the gallery circuit the elevation of graffiti to the status of 'high' art did however begin to bridge the gap between the uptown/downtown divide. Despite becoming the figurehead for street art's incorporation into the mainstream, Basquiat's art always remained uneasily rooted in the essentially outsider nature and mentality of its origins. Untitled (Bip) is an unequivocal example of this.
Translating the rawness and immediacy of the pictorial language of street art onto canvas and drawing on the simple and direct imagery and subject matter from the television cartoons that he loved, Basquiat creates an irreverent and deliberately provocative image of sharp graphic realism. The subject - a knock-out punch in a fight or possibly a boxing match between two ambiguous figures - is accompanied by cartoon stars and the onomatopoeic word 'bip', as the victim falls to the floor. All this is laid over an abstract painted background of sprayed and painted colour that knowingly pastiches the supposedly more elevated 'art brut' of Jean Dubuffet or the gestural abstraction of Franz Kline. Merging the gritty graphic language of street art with the 'higher' aspirations of abstraction, it is a work that on its creation in 1981, clearly announced the arrival of a new and provocative hybrid form of expression.
'The art world was mostly Minimal when I came up' Basquiat once recalled, 'I thought it alienated people from art. It seemed very college.' The intellectualism and precious exclusivity of the New York art world alongside the prolonged economic recession of the 1970s had led to the development of an increasingly visible gap between rich and poor and in Manhattan as well as between uptown and downtown neighbourhoods. When graffiti art, which had arisen and evolved into an exciting underground culture on the city's subways was brought into the gallery circuit in the early 1980s, it was a much-needed antidote to the dry Minimalist-Conceptual aesthetic that had previously dominated. Losing some of its energy and validity by becoming a chic and saleable product on the gallery circuit the elevation of graffiti to the status of 'high' art did however begin to bridge the gap between the uptown/downtown divide. Despite becoming the figurehead for street art's incorporation into the mainstream, Basquiat's art always remained uneasily rooted in the essentially outsider nature and mentality of its origins. Untitled (Bip) is an unequivocal example of this.
Translating the rawness and immediacy of the pictorial language of street art onto canvas and drawing on the simple and direct imagery and subject matter from the television cartoons that he loved, Basquiat creates an irreverent and deliberately provocative image of sharp graphic realism. The subject - a knock-out punch in a fight or possibly a boxing match between two ambiguous figures - is accompanied by cartoon stars and the onomatopoeic word 'bip', as the victim falls to the floor. All this is laid over an abstract painted background of sprayed and painted colour that knowingly pastiches the supposedly more elevated 'art brut' of Jean Dubuffet or the gestural abstraction of Franz Kline. Merging the gritty graphic language of street art with the 'higher' aspirations of abstraction, it is a work that on its creation in 1981, clearly announced the arrival of a new and provocative hybrid form of expression.