Jean-Michel Basquiat 1960-1988
Horn Players, 1883,
243 x 190 cm
CRITICAL EXCERPTS
Eric Jay, ARTnews, 9/84
“This Haitian-born artist’s work operates on the level of childlike fancy and play. While there
is a cagey, arts-professional reticence and style to them, his paintings achieve their effects
through the use of private, quirky symbols…Basquiat paints these characters in bright
carnival colors: yellow, silver, pink, red, blue and green. He respects his colors and knows
their force, rather than forcing them together—he is a colorist rather than a color
lover…Doodles embroider the figures, contributing to the lively sense of silliness. Basquiat
insists on imposing his vocabulary of signs and squiggles, but then he makes them either
very easy to understand or superfluous. His paintings are offhand, disorderly and random,
mixing rough and smooth, drawn and barely drawn, to create an impression of facility and
ease. The painter clearly tries not to try, going slack instead of slick…a big smile substitutes
for happiness.”
NYTimes piece
“As part of the never-ending marketing effort, paintings by Basquiat and other hot young art
stars are always being crated and shipped. They are flown to an exhibition in Europe, a
dealer on the West Coast, a collector’s home” NYTimes piece “In fact, neither he or the
graffitist Keith Haring had ever “bombed”—spray painted—dormant subway cars in the
train yards at night, a necessary rite of passage in the authentic graffiti subculture. More
importantly, as the critics pointed out, Basquiat’s paintings embodied more formal ties to
the history of art. He may have grown up, like most kids, on a diet of comic books, but clearly
he had also had a taste of Picasso.”
Jeffrey Dietch, Art in America, 1980
“a knockout combination of de Kooning and subway scribbles.”
Rene Ricard, ARTFORUM 1981
“If Cy Twombley and Jean Dubuffet had a baby and gave it up for adoption, it would be Jean
Michel. The elegance of Twombley is there…and so is the brut of the young Dubuffet…”
Cathleen McGuigan, NYTimes, 2/10/85
“His color-drenched canvases are peopled with primitive figures wearing menacing masklike
faces, painted against fields jammed with arrows, grids, crowns, skyscrapers, rockets and
words…The extent of Basquiat’s success would no doubt be impossible for an artist of lesser
gifts. Not only does he possess a bold sense of color and composition, but, in his best
paintings, unlike many of his contemporaries, he maintains a fine balance between
seemingly contradictory forces: control and spontaneity, menace and wit, urban imagery
and primitivism.”
Demosthenes Davvetas, Lines, Chapters, and Verses: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat,
ARTFORUM, 4/87
“By literally converting devalued materials into useful ones, Basquiat has illustrated the
transformative workings of art…The same type of thing happens to line. In all its different
linguistic and imagist expressions, it aggressively enters the realm of painting…These signs
have a double function: from one side they speak about the visible, while from the other they
make visible what is usually little noticed, or, rather, what is often repressed…Perhaps the
work is less like a mirror than like an eye or a voice: as eye, it observes and interprets life,
collecting selected items and organizing them within itself; thus organized, it becomes voice,
a clear utterance expressing what has been seen.”
Henry Geldzahler, NYTimes quoted from, comment upon purchasing a Basquiat
“I decided to over pay. I offered $2,000 for it. I knew he was authentic and I wanted to say,
‘Welcome to the real world.’”
Elizabeth Hess, Village Voice, 11/3/92
“Jean-Michel Basquiat would not have appreciated the fact that the art world is divided up
into those who think he was a genius and those who think he was a fraud. “White
supremacist” critics and curators—and there are many—refuse to give any living black
painter his or her due. Nevertheless, Basquiat was born with an artist gene (in Brooklyn); he
made it all the way to Documenta, the prestigious German art fair, by the time he was 21
because he was already painting exceptional works of art…As the Reagan-Bush years wore
on and racism became more rampant, opinion turned against Basquiat and all the graffiti
masters…He was dangerously good. Basquiat was dismissed as a kind of opportunist party
boy with a big ego. (name one famous male artist with a small one.)…His shocking OD death
at the age of 27 was devastating. The Rude Boy had not yet secured his place in
history…Right now I’d take students to see Basquiat before Matisse [Matisse and Basquiat
retrospective held at same time in NYC in '92]. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not arguing that
Basquiat is the better painter, but that he’s the infinitely more relevant painter. Matisse may
be the most socially disengaged artist we have ever seen in depth at the Modern; Basquiat’s
work is saturated in the political culture of the moment (his own heritage is Haitian and
Puerto Rican) and the search for the artist’s self. While much of the work is abstract the
overt subject is always racial identity…his paintings describe, over and over, the artist’s
anger. Basquiat was a great poet, with a rare ability to combine both pigment and text on
one surface…Basquiat’s poems often have a visual shape, as if they are dimensional…At their
best, the artworks are layered with references to…the unpredictable. The artist’s anxious
hand is always moving. As many critics have suggested, the influence of Dubuffet and
Twombly are obvious, along with the bravado of Picasso. But the mood is jazz. Basquiat,
apparently, worked to music and television, which explains why his output is so unconnected
to social realities. And disconnected too…”
Regarding the hybridity of Basquiat’s style, the critic John Russell noted in a 1984 review
that “Basquiat proceeds by disjunction—that is, by making marks that seem quite unrelated,
but that turn out to get on very well together.“ Basquiat himself observed: “I get my facts
from books, stuff on atomisers, the blues, ethyl alcohol, geese in the Egyptian style ... I put
what I like from them in my paintings.“
"Basquiat's canon revolves around single heroic figures: athletes, prophets, warriors, cops,
musicians, kings and the artist himself. In these images the head is often a central focus,
topped by crowns, hats, and halos. In this way the intellect is emphasized, lifted up to notice,
privileged over the body and the physicality of these figures (i.e. black men) commonly
represent in the world." — Kellie Jones, Lost in Translation: Jean-Michel in the (Re)Mix[27]
Fred Hoffman hypothesizes that underlying Basquiat’s sense of himself as an artist was his
"innate capacity to function as something like an oracle, distilling his perceptions of the
outside world down to their essence and, in turn, projecting them outward through his
creative acts." Additionally, continuing his activities as a graffiti artist, Basquiat often
incorporated words into his paintings. Before his career as a painter began, he produced
punk-inspired postcards for sale on the street, and became known for the political–poetical
graffiti under the name of SAMO. On one occasion Basquiat painted his girlfriend's dress
with the words "Little Shit Brown". He would often draw on random objects and surfaces,
including other people's property. The conjunction of various media is an integral element
of Basquiat's art. His paintings are typically covered with text and codes of all kinds: words,
letters, numerals, pictograms, logos, map symbols, diagrams and more.
Like a DJ, Basquiat adeptly reworked Neo-expressionism's clichéd language of
gesture, freedom, and angst and redirected Pop art's strategy of appropriation to
produce a body of work that at times celebrated black culture and history but also
revealed its complexity and contradictions.
— Lydia Lee
But despite a casual, often remarked graffiti-like appearance, the picture surface itself is
heavily reworked and semantically complex, while also maintaining a strict, underlying
compositional discipline. Like Rauschenburg, Basquiat’s adherence to a Cubist grid points to
a synthesis of ideas usually held to be mutually exclusive, and which also contradict any
straightforward assumptions of spontaneity in Expressionist, or “neo-primitivist“ art. In this,
Basquiat’s approach to composition is not so far removed from that of Andy Warhol,
although Basquiat’s textual and pictorial “quotations“ always retained a manual element.
Basquiat's 1983 painting Untitled (History of the Black People) "reclaims Egyptians as African
and subverts the concept of ancient Egypt as the cradle of Western Civilization". At the
center of the painting, Basquiat depicts an Egyptian boat being guided down the Nile River by
Osiris, the Egyptian god of the earth and vegetation.
On the right panel of the painting appear the words “Esclave, Slave, Esclave”. Two letters of
the word "Nile" are crossed out and Frohne suggests that, "The letters that are wiped out and
scribbled over perhaps reflect the acts of historians who have conveniently forgotten that
Egyptians were black and blacks were enslaved." On the left panel of the painting Basquiat has
illustrated two Nubian-style masks. The Nubians historically were darker in skin color, and
were considered to be slaves by the Egyptian people.
Borrowing elements of everyday language (brand names, trade marks, consumer clichés,
political and racial slogans, etc.), Basquiat created juxtapositions that reveal latent power
structures, whose realignment in turn produces ironies suggesting a fundamental
arbitrariness within the institutions of social discourse. At once absurd and menacing, this
sense of the arbitrary nevertheless remains attached to an idea of the exercise of power and
to a critical notion of historical arbitration. In Untitled (Rinso) a classic racist metaphor is
exposed in the form of a reference to a popular washing powder. The words NEW RINSO©,
appearing above and beside three stylised renderings of Negroes, seem to point towards the
word SLOGAN© in the centre of the painting, which in turn gives on to an actual slogan—1950
RINSO: THE GREATEST DEVELOPMENT IN SOAP HISTORY—with an arrow pointing to the
words WHITEWASHING ACTION at the bottom of the canvas. In case the viewer misses the
implications of this text, or the possible references to the violence of the 1950s civil rights
movements, the words NO SUH, NO SUH written on the left of the painting serve to lessen
any ambiguity.