| |
PATER
A powerful portrait by Basquiat which reveals the ambivalent feelings he had for his father
By Robert Brown
'What (Jean-Michel) internally wanted was the affection of his father and to reconcile with him. Everything was set up for that love he didn't get. Everything. It was expected by him, a reconciliation in the end. But it never happened. And I think his father was death-scared of it.'
Shenge Ka Pharoah (Basquiat's friend and assistant).
Painted in 1982, Pater is a dramatic and iconic portrait in which Basquiat forcefully and consciously seems to attempt to exorcise one of his central preoccupations; both his own and society's troubled relationship with the cult of the father-figure. Scrawled in vibrant colour against a dramatic abstract background, Pater, with its Latin title, refers to a generalised, archetypal image of a father as both hero and villain.
This is a totemic father, both God-the-father of Christian teaching as well as a personalised vision. Like a fetish-figure from some—as yet—undiscovered contemporary tribe, the image Basquiat presents is one of a forceful aggressive presence that, like his black hero portraits, seems to depict both a violator and victim, the oppressor and the oppressed, both a winner and a loser. This duality is emphasised by the scrawled halo above the figure's head and the graffitied 'cock and balls' slapped between his legs. It is a conscious and deliberate ambiguity that is common in Basquiat's art.
Crowning the figure with a halo and at the same time 'slapping him up' with a humorous and crude caricature of genitalia generates a simultaneous viewpoint that represents both extremes of feeling that Basquiat held towards his own father. The technique used is the visual language of the streets—the crude cartoon-like graffiti of the subway wall.
In contrast to this the rest of the figure is painted in Basquiat's own unique style—a direct and expressionistic way of painting that seems to hover between the raw vigour of childhood and the imitative stylising of adolescence. Basquiat's raw style responds directly to his inner vision, a vision that was determined by the artist's own intense anxieties about his life and his position within the world. Capturing in a raw, vibrant and expressionistic splattering of paint a sense of the complex array of violent emotions he must have felt towards his own father the artist has conjured a powerful and persuasive image of a male idol. An idol that with its impressive posture and tortured features is both powerful and pathetic, both a totem and a taboo.
Robert Brown is Head of Research & Education, Modern, Post-War and Contemporary Art.
Back to top
|
|
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988)
Sale 1232, Lot 27
Pater, 1982
Acrylic, oil and colored oilsticks on canvas
Estimate: $1,500,000-2,000,000
|
