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Lot Essay
Asbestos is one of Basquiat's most charged and encompassing explorations of his identity. The fisherman is a figure he returned to throughout his career as both personal totem and autobiographical metaphor: the mediator between worlds, the one who crosses water, and, by implication, the painter himself. Set against a ground of scorched orange and yellow that seems almost to combust, this work carries the full weight of an Atlantic inheritance Basquiat assembled from Brooklyn, Haiti, Puerto Rico and West Africa.
I’ve never been to Africa. I’m an artist who has been influenced by his New York environment. But I have cultural memory. I don’t need to look for it; it exists. It’s over there, in Africa.
Jean Michel Basquiat
The painting's ground is its first argument. Orange and yellow surge across the surface with the intensity of fire or late sun on open water, the warmth so total it reads almost as heat rather than color. Against this Basquiat set a standing figure in dark navy and black, drawn with the kind of compressed line that is somehow both urgent and precise: a torso, limbs, a head marked by a red form at the center that burns like an ember. The figure holds his fishing rod, and its feet are marked with tally lines that appear elsewhere in the composition, scratched in red in the upper corners like notation or count. To the left, a deep black border cuts the composition like a shoreline. Scattered throughout are Basquiat's characteristic marks and glyphs, grid-like boxes filled with symbols, arrows and repeated strokes, a white rectangle near the lower right that accumulates signs as though it were a ledger. The word "ASBESTOS" is written across the upper right in dark oilstick, frank and declarative. The surface is layered, worked over, revised, alive.
The fisherman is an established presence in Basquiat's iconography. To understand why, one must follow his ancestry. He grew up in Brooklyn within reach of the Atlantic. His father was Haitian, his mother Puerto Rican. His racial heritage bore the trace of the Middle Passage and, before that, the West African coastline from which it originated. Across each of these worlds the fisherman was not a picturesque figure but a working one: economically essential, a constant of daily life. Anglers worked beneath the Brooklyn Bridge; pirogues dotted the Senegalese coast; painted canoes defined island life. The image was overdetermined before Basquiat ever put it to paper.
What accumulated on top of that material reality was spiritual weight. In Haitian Vodou theology, the sea was the threshold between the living and their ancestors, and the fisherman who moved across it daily took on a ceremonial function: the mediator between worlds, the one whose passage was itself a ritual act. As the art historian Robert Farris Thompson observed of Basquiat's deep engagement with Atlantic spiritual traditions, his imagery drew on a reservoir of Kongo and Caribbean visual thinking in which the crossing was a site of profound metaphysical exchange (R.F. Thompson, "Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat," Jean-Michel Basquiat, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992, p. 32).
Catholic iconography added another layer. Basquiat was raised Catholic, and in that tradition the fisherman carries a precise charge: Christ's call to his disciples — "Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men" — transforms a practical occupation into a spiritual vocation, makes the casting of a net a metaphor for something far larger. For Basquiat, fluent in multiple theological registers at once, the figure absorbed all of these meanings without shedding any of them.
The self-portrait dimension of Asbestos follows directly. The fisherman who moves across the surface of the water, who punctures its membrane and retrieves things from beneath, is also the painter moving across the canvas. Basquiat was explicit about the relationship between his cultural inheritance and his art: "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." (J. M. Basquiat "Jean-Michel Basquiat." Interview by Demosthenes Davvetas. New Art International, October–November 1988, p. xiii). Asbestos is the work that figure produces: an image in which the Atlantic world Basquiat carried with him is made visible, through a figure who always already belongs to all of it.
Jordana Moore Saggese, in her close reading of Basquiat's iconographic systems, notes that his recurring figures operate less as representations than as "repositories of accumulated meaning," absorbing cultural content across multiple contexts simultaneously (J.M. Saggese, Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art, Berkeley, 2014, p. 87). The tally marks in Asbestos — those insistent red counts scratched into the upper corners — push this further. They suggest enumeration, inventory, time kept or debt recorded, registers that in Basquiat's hands carry the specific gravity of histories in which Black bodies were counted rather than named.
Asbestos entered the collection of Ethel Scull, whom with her husband Robert maintained some of the sharpest collecting instincts of the Post-War period in America. The Sculls had built relationships with Rauschenberg, Warhol and Johns before those artists achieved canonical standing, and their engagement with Basquiat reflects the same quality of attention: an early, unequivocal recognition of genius. The Louisiana Museum's current retrospective, Basquiat—Headstrong, has brought renewed critical attention to the genius of Basquiat’s draftsmanship specifically. Its focus on works on paper brilliantly making the case that Basquiat's line: restless, economic, capable of conjuring a body or a glyph in a single stroke, was totally accomplished. The show's success confirms what Asbestos demonstrates plainly: that the rawness of his mark-making was never naivety, but control exercised with haste but incredible depth of thought.
I’ve never been to Africa. I’m an artist who has been influenced by his New York environment. But I have cultural memory. I don’t need to look for it; it exists. It’s over there, in Africa.
Jean Michel Basquiat
The painting's ground is its first argument. Orange and yellow surge across the surface with the intensity of fire or late sun on open water, the warmth so total it reads almost as heat rather than color. Against this Basquiat set a standing figure in dark navy and black, drawn with the kind of compressed line that is somehow both urgent and precise: a torso, limbs, a head marked by a red form at the center that burns like an ember. The figure holds his fishing rod, and its feet are marked with tally lines that appear elsewhere in the composition, scratched in red in the upper corners like notation or count. To the left, a deep black border cuts the composition like a shoreline. Scattered throughout are Basquiat's characteristic marks and glyphs, grid-like boxes filled with symbols, arrows and repeated strokes, a white rectangle near the lower right that accumulates signs as though it were a ledger. The word "ASBESTOS" is written across the upper right in dark oilstick, frank and declarative. The surface is layered, worked over, revised, alive.
The fisherman is an established presence in Basquiat's iconography. To understand why, one must follow his ancestry. He grew up in Brooklyn within reach of the Atlantic. His father was Haitian, his mother Puerto Rican. His racial heritage bore the trace of the Middle Passage and, before that, the West African coastline from which it originated. Across each of these worlds the fisherman was not a picturesque figure but a working one: economically essential, a constant of daily life. Anglers worked beneath the Brooklyn Bridge; pirogues dotted the Senegalese coast; painted canoes defined island life. The image was overdetermined before Basquiat ever put it to paper.
What accumulated on top of that material reality was spiritual weight. In Haitian Vodou theology, the sea was the threshold between the living and their ancestors, and the fisherman who moved across it daily took on a ceremonial function: the mediator between worlds, the one whose passage was itself a ritual act. As the art historian Robert Farris Thompson observed of Basquiat's deep engagement with Atlantic spiritual traditions, his imagery drew on a reservoir of Kongo and Caribbean visual thinking in which the crossing was a site of profound metaphysical exchange (R.F. Thompson, "Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat," Jean-Michel Basquiat, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992, p. 32).
Catholic iconography added another layer. Basquiat was raised Catholic, and in that tradition the fisherman carries a precise charge: Christ's call to his disciples — "Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men" — transforms a practical occupation into a spiritual vocation, makes the casting of a net a metaphor for something far larger. For Basquiat, fluent in multiple theological registers at once, the figure absorbed all of these meanings without shedding any of them.
The self-portrait dimension of Asbestos follows directly. The fisherman who moves across the surface of the water, who punctures its membrane and retrieves things from beneath, is also the painter moving across the canvas. Basquiat was explicit about the relationship between his cultural inheritance and his art: "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." (J. M. Basquiat "Jean-Michel Basquiat." Interview by Demosthenes Davvetas. New Art International, October–November 1988, p. xiii). Asbestos is the work that figure produces: an image in which the Atlantic world Basquiat carried with him is made visible, through a figure who always already belongs to all of it.
Jordana Moore Saggese, in her close reading of Basquiat's iconographic systems, notes that his recurring figures operate less as representations than as "repositories of accumulated meaning," absorbing cultural content across multiple contexts simultaneously (J.M. Saggese, Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art, Berkeley, 2014, p. 87). The tally marks in Asbestos — those insistent red counts scratched into the upper corners — push this further. They suggest enumeration, inventory, time kept or debt recorded, registers that in Basquiat's hands carry the specific gravity of histories in which Black bodies were counted rather than named.
Asbestos entered the collection of Ethel Scull, whom with her husband Robert maintained some of the sharpest collecting instincts of the Post-War period in America. The Sculls had built relationships with Rauschenberg, Warhol and Johns before those artists achieved canonical standing, and their engagement with Basquiat reflects the same quality of attention: an early, unequivocal recognition of genius. The Louisiana Museum's current retrospective, Basquiat—Headstrong, has brought renewed critical attention to the genius of Basquiat’s draftsmanship specifically. Its focus on works on paper brilliantly making the case that Basquiat's line: restless, economic, capable of conjuring a body or a glyph in a single stroke, was totally accomplished. The show's success confirms what Asbestos demonstrates plainly: that the rawness of his mark-making was never naivety, but control exercised with haste but incredible depth of thought.