"Basquiat’s words “exert a spell on us as if they were poetry pent up inside vibrating boxes…But they are also like revealed mysteries, or, better yet, “suspicions” of poetry… emerging from our ever more chaotic forests of language, images, and history."
Brimming with tremendous graphic force and ferocious mark-marking, Untitled from 1983 is a riveting embodiment of the instinctive and unrivaled brilliance which distinguishes Jean-Michel Basquiat’s artistic oeuvre. One of a suite of twelve works executed in 1983, the present work emerges from a pivotal period in Basquiat's career as he rose to extraordinary heights of critical and commercial prominence. Replete with the hallmark iconography and dazzling energy of Basquiat’s unique and coveted pictorial lexicon, Untitled fuses image, word, and gesture in a vibrant.mes dley that contends with some of the most important and enduring subjects and concerns of the artist’s pioneering practice. Based on a collage of 28 drawings mounted on canvas, and drawn over in oil-stick, Untitled inverts the black-on-white palette of this original creation to create stark white marks on black-dominated canvas: a subversive commentary that flips the marginalization of Blackness on its head. Notably, the present work has been held in the collects ion of celebrated New York gallerist and artist Tony Shafrazi for over fifteen years; a friend and contemporary of Basquiat’s, Shafrazi championed the young artist’s work since the early 1980s, and hosted several pivotal exhibitions of his work.
A portrait of the artist’s unfiltered poetic thoughts, Untitled emerges with a dynamic symbolic resonance. For the present series of silkscreens, Basquiat chose to invert the original work, in which his off-white notebook pages were scrawled over with black oil stick. Emerging from a field of black, a single white, mask-like face radiates like a ghostly apparition; void of detail, the blank face is punctuated by a pair of cavernous eyes. Behind the central figure, Basquiat’s notebook pages create a compositional grid, a cacophony of text and imagery that, when taken as a whole, map out the vast genius of Basquiat’s inner thinking. Limited to a monochromatic palette and inverting the positive and negative space of the original composition, the present composition reads like a photographic negative; restrained and refined, Untitled possesses an arresting elegance that evokes the rigor of minimalism while remaining deeply informed by Basquiat’s gritty, street aesthetic.
"Much like a sorcerer seeks to turn lead into gold, the young artist...sought to radically transform the content and meaning of image and text. By reversing the information conveyed in these drawings, Basquiat demonstrated to both himself and the world that he possessed the capacity, through one simple act, to turn a world dominated by white into one where black dominates.”
In these vignettes, Basquiat lays bare the cultural and aesthetic influences which form the core of his practice, offering the viewer an unmediated look into the mind’s inner workings as he distills his perceptions down to their essence and, in turn, projects them outward in explosive bursts of dazzling pictorial brilliance. The merging of image and word is deeply emblematic of Basquiat’s pioneering technique: inspired by artists such as Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg, Basquiat’s inclusion of text in his artworks also speaks to his street art days in the 1970s as part of the street-art duo SAMO©. Basquiat was riveted by different modes of human expression and communication, and frequently incorporated within his paintings a series of codes found in Henry Dreyfuss’s Symbol Sourcebook. He took a particular interest in the 'hobo signs' which traveling vagabonds would use to denote certain areas as safe or treacherous along the road, and indeed several of the signs appear within the present work, signifying warnings such as 'There are thieves about', 'Dangerous drinking water', and 'You’ll be cursed out'. Many of these symbols, carried throughout his practice, are repeated like incantations in his drawings and paintings.
Basquiat was an avid autodidact, picking up images, words and music everywhere he went, absorbings and applying them in his paintings, drawings, and most significantly, in his notebook pages. In Untitled, each frenzied vignette presents poetic text and visual mantra of its own: fragmented song lyrics, diagrams, agglomerations, scatterings, and lists. Like white chalk on a black chalkboard, Basquiat here seems intent on teaching a lesson to the uninitiated. On the uncanny power behind Basquiat’s use of text in his body of work, Francesco Pellizzi articulates how Basquiat’s words “exert a spell on us as if they were poetry pent up inside vibrating boxes…But they are also like revealed mysteries, or, better yet, “suspicions” of poetry… emerging from our ever more chaotic forests of language, images, and history.” (Francesco Pellizzi, “Black and White All Over: Poetry and Desolation Painting,” Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York, 1989, p.15).
Despite his meteoric ascension from street artist to New York art world icon in the early 1980s, as a young man, Basquiat faced a great deal of racial discrimination. In his recent monograph on the artist, scholar Fred Hoffman suggests that Basquiat’s “reversal” technique in works such as the present might be considered as a symbolic acknowledgement of racism. This might be Basquiat’s way of “reversing the norm,” Hoffman suggests—a way to turn racism on its head. He writes: “Much like a sorcerer seeks to turn lead into gold, the young artist...sought to radically transform the content and meaning of image and text. By reversing the information conveyed in these drawings, Basquiat demonstrated to both himself and the world that he possessed the capacity, through one simple act, to turn a world dominated by white into one where black dominates.” (Fred Hoffman, The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York, 2017, p. 95) Basquiat’s remarkable pictorial language is simultaneously revealing of a man who was greatly troubled by the vast dichotomy between the desire to create his own reality, and the stifling rules and restrictions of a society to which, as a Black artist in the American 1980s, he was all too often subjected. As with all artistic geniuses, Basquiat left a resounding mark on the art world that continues to reverberate well into the present day. An explosive whirlwind of sensation and intrigue, Untitled vividly embodies the raw, visceral syntax of Basquiat’s ground-breaking style.
