“In Basquiat’s drawing there is rarely any breathing room. Rather, you are sucked in and carried along an often intricate and complex journey through a maze of references which oftent.mes s make little rational sense but nonetheless feel like they have a reason to exist.”
Erupting into a visual cacophony of symbols, signs, and cyphers, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (NY CZAR) of 1988 offers a glimpse into the artist’s energetic, imaginative and ingenious mind. Executed the same year as the artist’s unt.mes ly death at the age of 27, this arresting drawing stands as test.mes nt to the gravity and intent with which the artist approached his works on paper at the apex of his celebrated career. Within the present work, Basquiat frantically scratches away words and complete illustrations, scattering references to comic books, human anatomy, the natural world and his own cultural heritage seemingly at random across the picture plane. With its complex pantheon of intricate iconography, Untitled (NY CZAR) encapsulates Basquiat’s unique pictorial lexicon which wavers between the vivaciously dynamic and the quietly unsettling. Through seemingly disparate iconographic references culled from years of personal experience, Basquiat here creates a rigorous roadmap to his own unique vernacular, unparalleled and unrepeatable by any artist before or since.
A complex labyrinth of symbols and images fills the sheet, the scattered words, staccato scribbles, and punctuating images conveying a lyrical sense of rhythm akin to the cadence of a jazz score. The titular “CZAR” is repeated no fewer than 19 t.mes s across the composition; this political term for a high-ranking official, coupled with phrases like “Power W/out Nobility,” “Leeches,” and “Dehydrated” as well as several drawings of adult fleas, offers clear insight into Basquiat’s perception of traditional power structures. Other cultural references are littered throughout. In the upper left, three characters from the early Dick Tracy comic books are referenced by name and image: Diet Smith, the industrialist and inventor; Brilliant, his blind genius son; and B.O. Plenty, a reformed criminal farmer. Appearing in many of Basquiat’s works from this period, the artist’s love of and familiarity with comic books and cartoons dates to his early childhood. A visual auto-didact, the images and animations of these books are amongst the vast and varied sources of rich visual media Basquiat collects ed over the course of his life and frequently appear in his paintings, creating a highly specific visual vernacular of cultural images and iconography at once universally familiar and entirely distinct. As well as cartoons, the present work also references an issue of National Geographic magazine: “Moonlight bathes El Castillo” appears twice above a sketch of “Yucatan Ruins.” Both the phrase and the image are quoted directly from a picture story on Maya’s sacred city. Fascinated by his own Caribbean and Hispanic cultural heritage, Basquiat’s works showcase his ever-expanding lens as to his place within the world, and the multitude of histories, myths, legends, and belief systems that shape us.
Untitled (NY CZAR) also prominently features one of the artist’s most enduring motifs: the anatomical drawing. Several deconstructed diagrams of human eyeballs punctuate the surface, underscored by iterations of “Iris,” “Cornea,” and “Retina”, perhaps foregrounding the notion of perception. Basquiat’s intense interest in exploring the anatomy of the human body can be traced back to his hospitalisation at the age of seven due to a car accident, a traumatic event that would profoundly shape his artistic lexicon up until his unt.mes ly death. During his recovery, Basquiat’s mother gifted him a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, the 19th-century text known for its groundbreaking role in the history of understanding the human body. The book instilled in Basquiat an immense interest in the kinds of ways that the human – both literally and metaphorically – can be dissected, his own thoughts and brain quite literally spilling onto the page in the case of the present work.
“His works have a quality that seems to draw you in; it is like they offered some kind of clue to solving the puzzle of what’s in his mind. It sounds easy, but it is quite difficult for an artist to achieve that. The words, symbols and body parts that he uses all come together to form an expression of what he is thinking of as an artist...”
Moreover, as an artist constantly on the move from the earliest moments leaving his graffiti mark on the streets and buildings of New York City, through the inception and continued acclaim of his professional career, drawing as a medium was inherently more complementary to Basquiat’s peripatetic lifestyle. As part of the inherent intimacy of creating a drawing, Basquiat would bend over his paper surfaces so that the compositions occupied his entire realm of vision – eliciting a strong communion with the work and an intense introspection that his paintings, in their often-monumental scale, are unable to achieve. Working on paper, therefore, served a significantly more profound and personal end for Basquiat than as a mere preparatory tool. Untitled (NY CZAR) is brilliantly demonstrative of this concentrated energy; in its seamless integration of writing and drawing, image and text, the present work reads equally as a composition of depthless intricacy and curiosity while affording us a privileged glimpse into the deepest inner workings of its genius creator’s mind. Robert Storr extolled the unequivocal power of Basquiat’s drawings within the scope of his oeuvre when he described how, “Drawing, for him, was something you did rather than something done, an activity rather than a medium. The seemingly throw-away sheets that carpeted his studio might appear little more than warm-ups for painting, except that the artist, a shrewd connoisseur of his own off-hand and under foot inventions did not in fact throw them away, but instead kept the best for constant reference and re-use. Or, kept them because they were, quite simply, indestructibly vivid” (Robert Storr, “Two Hundred Beats Per Min,” in Exh. Cat., New York, The Robert Miller Gallery, Basquiat Drawings, 1990, n.p.).
Thus the present work highlights Basquiat’s deft hand presented as a stream of consciousness, his commentary pouring out onto the page in a careful equilibrium between urgency and coherence. The repetitive, frenetic mark-making is scrawled across the page, showcasing the sheer range of Basquiat’s visual language in his works on paper. Brilliantly formulated in the artist’s innovative mind and then translated onto the paper, the drawing is as vivid and alive now as it was at the moment of its execution. As Robert Storr commented: “in drawings such as these - it is all still happening right before your eyes.” (Ibid., n.p.).