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Lot Essay
Before his first exhibition with Anina Nosei in New York, Basquiat had already gained notoriety and a kind of cult status amongst artists and the discerning public as the 'public poet', SAMO, inscribing walls and windows in uptown and downtown New York with his brief, ironic aphorisms, incitements to passers-by to step off the treadmill of life, to reject the banality of the status quo. But in 1982, he began to experience the thrill of wider recognition and financial success. However, his promotion in the press and the voracious demands of an art market hungry for new blood soon soured. An image quickly emerged amongst art pundits of the artist as a kind of strange primitive creature, uncontrollable but capable of grand, if naïve, statements in his art. The sophistication of his aesthetic, which had evolved from his SAMO days, was largely ignored.
In retrospect, it is clear that Basquiat's work was profoundly formed by the legacy of some of the giants of modern art: his consciously child-like lines and collage owe much to Dubuffet; the practice of drawing, scribbling, writing, collaging and painting simultaneously to Twombly; the confidence to follow his own brash style of portraiture to Picasso and an interest in imagery from ancient cultures and mythological references to Pollock.
Untitled (Yellow), 1984, is alive with the artist's recurring obsessions with mortality, myth, fairytales, black history and popular culture: comic-book explosions and violent encounters, a bloody knife, an Arthurian sword, a US dime, a crab, a dead parrot and numerous other apparently unconnected subjects crowd this intriguing work with the artist's preoccupations. The layers of Photostats and paint intermingle with the artist's scrawled boyish motifs and the sunshine yellow of the paint surface dazzles the viewer - just as the cult of Basquiat the artist-hero dazzled the New York art world of the 1980s before it was so prematurely extinguished by his death.
In retrospect, it is clear that Basquiat's work was profoundly formed by the legacy of some of the giants of modern art: his consciously child-like lines and collage owe much to Dubuffet; the practice of drawing, scribbling, writing, collaging and painting simultaneously to Twombly; the confidence to follow his own brash style of portraiture to Picasso and an interest in imagery from ancient cultures and mythological references to Pollock.
Untitled (Yellow), 1984, is alive with the artist's recurring obsessions with mortality, myth, fairytales, black history and popular culture: comic-book explosions and violent encounters, a bloody knife, an Arthurian sword, a US dime, a crab, a dead parrot and numerous other apparently unconnected subjects crowd this intriguing work with the artist's preoccupations. The layers of Photostats and paint intermingle with the artist's scrawled boyish motifs and the sunshine yellow of the paint surface dazzles the viewer - just as the cult of Basquiat the artist-hero dazzled the New York art world of the 1980s before it was so prematurely extinguished by his death.