"What drew Basquiat almost obsessively to the depiction of the human head was his fascination with the face as a passageway from exterior physical presence into the hidden realities of man’s psychological and mental realms…they not only peer out as if seeing, but also invite the viewer to penetrate within."
Rendered with ferocious intensity, the searing silhouette of Untitled (Head) is a riveting embodiment of the instinctive and unrivalled brilliance which distinguished Jean-Michel Basquiat from the earliest years of his career. The present work is notably large exemplar from a limited suite of drawings that, in their haunting and unique renderings of skull-like heads, powerfully exemplify the extraordinary intensity, focus, and drive which fueled Basquiat at this pivotal moment in his burgeoning career. Executed in 1982, Untitled (Head) dates to the very year that Basquiat’s meteoric ascension from unknown to icon began; indeed, it was in 1982 that Basquiat had his first solo exhibitions with Annina Nosei in New York, Larry Gagosian in Los Angeles, and Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich, establishing the young street artist formerly known as SAMO© as a key contributor to the bustling and competitive New York art scene. Exploding with gestural fervor and featuring a head more muscular than skeletal, Untitled (Head) embodies both the artist’s innate ability to distill angst into dynamism and his newfound maturity as a deftly skilled draftsman.
Holding a graphic power as potent today as the day they were drawn, Basquiat’s works on paper comprise a fundamental element of his prolific oeuvre and are essential to a comprehensive understanding of the diverse signs, symbols, and subjects which make up his staggeringly inventive output. In Untitled (Head), expressionistic strokes of black oil stick congregate against an off-white background to form a disembodied human head. The frenzied potency of Basquiat’s variegated strokes is contained only by the arresting confidence of his bold oil stick outline. As a test.mes nt to the importance of the 1982 head studies, at the t.mes of Basquiat’s death in 1988, no fewer than twenty-seven of the studies remained in the artist’s personal collects ion. Fred Hofmann’s description of the 1982 heads: “These figures are unsettling, leaving the viewer with the feeling that they exist in another realm. Peering out into our space, they are oracles conveying a message from another dimension.” (Fred Hoffman, The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York 2017, p. 79) In its talismanic rendering of a skull, the present work is a paradigmatic example of the artist’s most iconic motif; compelling as both idiosyncratic self-portrait and shamanistic totem, the fierce character summoned in Untitled (Head) would prevail as a primary graphic anchor for Basquiat throughout his career, appearing in and dominating the majority of his best-known masterworks.
“These figures are unsettling, leaving the viewer with the feeling that they exist in another realm. Peering out into our space, they are oracles conveying a message from another dimension.”
Basquiat’s raw, primitive aesthetic recalls Picasso’s captivation with the aesthetic of traditional African art and sculpture. In particular, both artists drew inspiration from ancestral African masks, which has become integral to the discourse on affinity and cultural appropriation in art. Basquiat took a particular interest in Picasso’s abstract aesthetic, and pursued a similar pictorial approach in his own work. Drafted in a flat, reductive style with minimal facial detail, Untitled (Head) evokes the formal qualities of the legendary African masks he would have seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a child. The depiction of the mask in this early work also represents Basquiat’s relentless exploration of cultural identity: the artist, who was born to a Haitian father and Puerto-Rican mother, often expressed his feelings of racialized otherness in a white-dominated art world. Basquiat’s use of the mask, a sacred object which historically functions in the Black diaspora as a mediator between the physical and spiritual realms, now becomes an unapologetic visual metaphor for black identity.
Despite his remarkably young age at the t.mes of creation, Basquiat displays his mature aesthetic vocabulary in Untitled (Head), emphatically demonstrating the signature figuration, Cubist mastery of form, and unparalleled intensity of mark-making that would come to define his output. Appearing in three-quarters view and overlapping gray-colored striations and an organic red shape situated in its cheek, the head engages two-dimensional space with impressive depth. Pillar-like eyes, one a rich black and the other a deep ocean blue, narrow with searing direction and the bared teeth express an immediate and astonishing fury. In its emotional intensity, one scholar describes Basquiat’s astute observation of psycho-spiritual states of being: "What drew Basquiat almost obsessively to the depiction of the human head was his fascination with the face as a passageway from exterior physical presence into the hidden realities of man’s psychological and mental realms…they not only peer out as if seeing, but also invite the viewer to penetrate within." (Exh. Cat., New York, Acquavella Galleries, Jean-Michel Basquiat Drawing: Works from the Schorr Family collects ion, 2014, p. 74) As he fixes the viewer with his striking gaze, the snarling face demands recognition of Basquiat’s instinctive and lauded abilities as one of the greatest draft.mes n of the twentieth century.
Capturing the expressive urgency of his street art escapades, Untitled (Head) also showcases Basquiat’s ability to simultaneously depict the internal and the external. Brilliantly formulated in the artist’s intuitive and innovative psyche and then translated onto the paper surface, the sheer visual voltage of Untitled (Head) reveals the impassioned, almost compulsive intensity Basquiat brought to both his works on paper and to his larger practice. Far from inanimate, the charged lines achieve an intensely expressive power—Basquiat delivers a fusion of internal and external sensory experiences with the electrifying force of a live wire.
