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Lot Essay
Executed in 1987, Untitled (Colored Boy Piano Player) is a raw and poetic work on paper by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Basquiat’s drawings capture his swift, improvisatory thought process with particular vividness, as ideas, images, words and sounds from a diverse array of sources are channelled directly from hand to page. The present work combines a number of key motifs in an enigmatic yet distinctly moody composition. It was included in an important show of Basquiat’s work held at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles in 1998, on the tenth anniversary of the artist’s death.
Drawn in graphite at the centre are diagrams of an eye procedure, with the crossed-out caption ‘UNDER THE EYELID’. Anatomical textbooks were an important source of imagery for the artist, and the eye a particular visual focus. Basquiat has also twice drawn the head of a Popeye-like figure smoking a corncob pipe, an angry character with an eyepatch, and two cartoonish zoo animals reaching through the bars of their cages.
Overlaid in thicker black oilstick are a bold horizon line, and symbols taken from the ‘hobo code’ reproduced in Henry Dreyfuss’s Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols, published in 1972. Basquiat used these icons—showing a secret language supposedly scrawled by vagabonds across the United States—across many of his drawings and paintings. Here he repeats a slanted ‘T’ shape indicating ‘A BEATING AWAITS YOU HERE’, appending the caption with his signature copyright and trademark symbols, and three diagonal lines that mean ‘THIS IS NOT A SAFE PLACE’. The latter phrase is recited like a broken incantation at the lower right, with some of the words crossed out.
The phrase ‘COLORED BOY PIANO PLAYER’ is written at the top of the picture. It bears no overt relationship to the rest of the work’s imagery, but points to Basquiat’s interest in music and in representations of race in American culture. His heroes included Black sports stars and jazz musicians who, like himself, had risen to prominence despite societal prejudice, and he often paid tribute to them in his work.
The drawing comes together as a concert of citations, variously playful and ominous. It conveys the mood of an artist who always felt himself to be something of an outsider, but whose approach to visual and verbal material allowed him to explore different worlds with the freedom of a virtuoso. 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, Paris 2000, p. 59).
Drawn in graphite at the centre are diagrams of an eye procedure, with the crossed-out caption ‘UNDER THE EYELID’. Anatomical textbooks were an important source of imagery for the artist, and the eye a particular visual focus. Basquiat has also twice drawn the head of a Popeye-like figure smoking a corncob pipe, an angry character with an eyepatch, and two cartoonish zoo animals reaching through the bars of their cages.
Overlaid in thicker black oilstick are a bold horizon line, and symbols taken from the ‘hobo code’ reproduced in Henry Dreyfuss’s Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols, published in 1972. Basquiat used these icons—showing a secret language supposedly scrawled by vagabonds across the United States—across many of his drawings and paintings. Here he repeats a slanted ‘T’ shape indicating ‘A BEATING AWAITS YOU HERE’, appending the caption with his signature copyright and trademark symbols, and three diagonal lines that mean ‘THIS IS NOT A SAFE PLACE’. The latter phrase is recited like a broken incantation at the lower right, with some of the words crossed out.
The phrase ‘COLORED BOY PIANO PLAYER’ is written at the top of the picture. It bears no overt relationship to the rest of the work’s imagery, but points to Basquiat’s interest in music and in representations of race in American culture. His heroes included Black sports stars and jazz musicians who, like himself, had risen to prominence despite societal prejudice, and he often paid tribute to them in his work.
The drawing comes together as a concert of citations, variously playful and ominous. It conveys the mood of an artist who always felt himself to be something of an outsider, but whose approach to visual and verbal material allowed him to explore different worlds with the freedom of a virtuoso. 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, Paris 2000, p. 59).