“Robert Farris Thompson I thought wrote the best thing—the guy that wrote Flash of the Spirit, which is probably the best book I ever read on African art. It's one of the best.”
A masterfully composed mélange of cryptic symbols, allusive figures and coded language scrawled in rhythmic script, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled from 1985 is both a paragon of the artist’s singular visual language and a stat.mes nt of broad social critique. Held since its execution in the collects ion of Dr. Robert Farris Thompson, the renowned thinker, writer and art historian of the African diaspora, the present work is a token of the deep respect and understanding the artist and the writer had for one another. A constellation of distinct scenes made into a cohesive whole, Untitled testifies to Basquiat’s ability to weave a complex network of references within his painting to hold a mirror to the production of meaning itself. First published in 1983, Dr. Robert Farris Thompson’s seminal Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy left an indelible mark on the young Basquiat. A pivotal text, the book was a breakthrough in the study of the artistic, social and religious contexts of the African diaspora on both sides of the Atlantic, drawing deep parallels and forging new analyses into the cultural production of its peoples. Basquiat began making work which referenced the book the year it was published, and a 1984 meeting between the artist and Dr. Thompson became the genesis of an enduring friendship between the two men. Dr. Thompson would go on to write the introduction for the artist’s 1985 Mary Boone exhibition, as well as an acclaimed essay in Basquiat’s posthumous retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
“Beyond his talent as a painter stands his genius for social stat.mes nt: locked in the labyrinth of his painted texts and diagrams are social truths and antidotes crying out for assessment.”
Right: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jazz, 1986, acrylic, oil pastel, and collage on wood. Private collects ion
Art © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York
Enclosed within a blue border and further embedded in a field of white pigment, the composition of Untitled unfolds across the canvas, dually recalling the regimented cells of comic-strips and the raw, tactile quality of Graffiti paste-ups. The artist’s Xeroxed images are buried in the pigment, first adhered to the canvas, and then overpainted to be made contiguous and whole. Basquiat was holistic in his conflation of the high and low, using traditionally revered oil paint with common, every day Xerox, referencing simultaneously the aesthetic hallmarks of mass-media, street art, and his artistic forebears. Like Robert Rauschenberg before him, Basquiat’s visual language was in a constant state of remix, a context in which he could reframe preexisting imagery to forge new meaning. The Xerox medium not only provided a textural and visual counterpoint to his oils, but also a lens through which the artist couldview his own work, adjust, and perfect his message. Despite this self-conscious approach, in the words of Dr. Thompson, “[t]here was a kind of deliberate roughness to his paintings, as if to say: I remain a warrior of the streets; behold the world as seen through vernacular eyes,” culminating in a work both cerebral in construction and expressionistic in execution. (Robert Farris Thompson, “Three Works by Basquiat,” in: Exh. Cat., New Orleans, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Basquiat and the Bayou, 2014-2015, p. 31-32)
Appearing in a serial format, the artist’s distinct style and instantly recognizable cast of characters—the one-eyed man and his two-eyed counterpart—are immediately visible, engaged in an ambiguous narrative. Within the passages of the picture plane, a semi-legible relationship takes shape; playing the accordion, Basquiat’s two-eyed man performs, expresses, creates, while the artist’s cyclopic figure inspects and assesses. Around them are an array of electrical symbols reminiscent of those found in technical manuals and television stages, a recurring theme within the artist’s oeuvre, as well as more generally legible signifiers of film and television including the silhouette of a person on a screen as well as lists of classic films and actors. Positioning the present work as a commentary on the systems that govern artistic production, Dr. Thompson writes, “There was money to be made in the technocratic world invoked by Basquiat’s hand. But here, as in so many instances, the money went to white people. Basquiat shows Al Jolson’s limousine emerging, sleek and rich, out of nowhere.” (Ibid., p. 37) Indeed, the names of black screen stars from Hollywood’s Golden Age, Ethel Waters, Lena Horne and Eddie Anderson are inscribed beneath the well-known films Basquiat invokes, placing these actors, who faced marginalization throughout their careers, centrally within a cultural canon that had excluded them from taking on powerful, central roles.
Oscillating between legibility and obfuscation, Untitled brings together a set of fractured elements— scenes, characters, words and symbols—and flattens them across t.mes and space. Basquiat made scathing critiques of racialized power structures related to cultural production throughout his career, with works like 1983’s Hollywood Africans laying bare the parallels across t.mes between the treatment of highly visible black pop cultural figures and enslaved people. A test.mes nt to the artist’s genius, the present work makes the sociopolitical dichotomies of cultural and cinematic production in the 1920s relevant to the art market of the 1980s and beyond. Basquiat trains his critical lens on the film industry, a proxy for the liminal space between art and commerce, as a means to express his own disquiet, bringing together, “Idioms of body and idioms of electronic happening, running together [to] suggest a post-industrial lingua franca whose speakers, black or any color, will be free.” (Robert Farris Thompson, “Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat,” in: Ex
