In Untitled, the tumult of pure color and line that distinguish its dynamic composition parallels Jean-Michel Basquiat’s profound aesthetic historiography of the United States: in a phantom white abstraction, the geographical contours of the country’s map emerge here, marked by gestural inscriptions like “SUGAR” and “TOBACCO” that denote the agricultural commodities and labor outputs historically associated with distinct American regions. Together, the abstract map and masks coalesce to form the most iconic motif in Basquiat's oeuvre: the human skull. Executed in 1981, Untitled synthesizes the vigorous markmaking, calligraphic signs, and sociopolitical commentary that propelled Basquiat’s meteoric ascent from his street art origins to international stardom. Blazing hues of red, orange, and yellow electrify the dark pictorial surface, where the tactile qualities of his collage and paintwork – at t.mes s scrawled, at others dripping or smudged – retain and exalt the vital immediacy of his foundational practice. Testifying to its significance within Basquiat’s prolific output, Untitled bears an extensive exhibition history, including the critically acclaimed 2010-11 retrospective Jean-Michel Basquiat held at Fondation Beyeler, Basel and Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris and the 2017-18 exhibition Jean-Michel Basquiat: Boom for Real held at Barbican Center, London and Schirn Kunsthalle Museum, Frankfurt. Untitled is further distinguished by its exceptional provenance, having first been acquired from Anina Nosei Gallery, Basquiat’s first art dealer in the 1980s. A consummate and searing example of Basquiat’s early works on paper, Untitled embodies the artist’s innate ability to distill angst into visual dynamism and his newfound maturity as a deftly skilled draftsman.

Dominating the center of the composition in Untitled, Basquiat abstracts the geography of the United States of America into an amorphous form of ghostly white segmented by key symbols and inscriptions. His loose painterly map associates American regions with the natural resources that have historically contributed to their economic development: “SUGAR” and “TOBACCO” repeat throughout the South to reference the agricultural economy of the Antebellum Era, while the West Coast is coated in dense scrawls of golden yellow, reminiscent of the California Gold Rush in the mid-1800s.

Emerging respectively from swathes of blood red and ghostly white, two of Basquiat’s signature black skull-like heads stare outward with harrowing eyes and clenched teeth, as if to assert the primacy of the Black figure within the history of the United States. As Jackie Wullschlager astutely notes about the present work, “A sense of events as circular, a doomed cycle of violence and oppression — same old — dominates Basquiat’s take on history painting. Untitled is a loosely painted map of the US dotted with black masks and the words “Sugar” and “Tobacco” scrawled across the southern states.” (Jackie Wullschlager, “The off-the-wall brilliance of Jean-Michel Basquiat,” The Financial t.mes s, 29 September 2017 (online)) Basquiat's abstracted map, smaller masks, and muscular strokes of paint together form a larger skull — a haunting reminder of the labor which built this country, and arguably the artist's most iconic, conceptaully loaded motif.

With characteristic semiotic flair, Basquiat powerfully introduces central themes of race and capitalism into Untitled by way of this cartographic interpretation. Under Basquiat’s hand, commodities such as sugar, tobacco, and gold become allegorical motifs for a fraught economic history intertwined with colonialism, the slave trade, and plantation labor, revealing the complex and politicized relationship between modern society and natural resources. As curator Richard Marshall has observed, “These frequent references… reveal Basquiat's interest in aspects of commerce – trading, selling and buying. Basquiat is scrutinizing man's seizure and monopolization of the earth's animal and material resources, and questioning why and how these resources, that are ideally owned by all of the world's inhabitants, have become objects of manipulation, power, and wealth at the expense of the well being of all mankind” (Richard Marshall, “Jean-Michel Basquiat and his Subjects” in Enrico Navarra, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris 2000, p. 43).

The criticality behind Basquiat’s Untitled is commensurate with his searing painterly bravura seen in full display here, which reinvigorated the vocabulary of modern art with an unprecedented aesthetic intensity. Ever the iconographic alchemist, Basquiat did not.mes rely appropriate or create pastiches of the styles, references, and traditions he accessed, he instead commanded these sources into a unique contemporary narrative. In Untitled, the depthless expanse of jet-black and stark strokes of white is especially redolent of Franz Kline; the rough eschewal of formal perspective invokes the Art Brut sensibility of Jean Dubuffet; and the abstracted blocks of red, orange, blue, and yellow recall the color fields paintings of Mark Rothko or Clyfford Still. Meanwhile, the two disembodied heads in the present work reference African reliquary masks not only in form but also in recalling an almost spiritual presence. Basquiat, like his hero Picasso before him, assessed African sculpture to interpret contemporary visual culture from a completely new perspective. While for Picasso, primitivism was an antidote to the conservatism of the academies, for Basquiat it was a means to critique the Western history of art, expressing a distinctly contemporary angst tied to prevalent social issues concerning race and ethnicity.

Also exemplified in Untitled, Basquiat’s dynamic union of image and work is a signature component within his pioneering technique that asserts his painterly force with unabashed grit and subversion. For Basquiat, words are as potent as his graphic symbols, and his inclusion of text in his artworks is indebted to his street art days in the 1970s as part of the duo SAMO©. Initially, Basquiat first made waves on the burgeoning downtown New York art scene in 1978 when he teamed up with his classmate Al Diaz to paint enigmatic slogans across the walls of corporate or public buildings, in highly visible spaces all over the city. More than just a street art tag, however, these slogans, executed under the aegis of SAMO©, were poetic, syncopated literary maxims aimed at critiquing both the predominantly white art world and American culture at large. Taking the essence of the streets to the studio, Basquiat would later paint with voracious energy on anything he could get his hands on, from walls and discarded pieces of cardboard to old television sets and refrigerators, elevating the quotidian to ever-new heights.

It is perhaps Basquiat’s works on paper like Untitled, however, which reveal some of the most striking displays of the undying expressive urgency for which the artist is acclaimed. A self-taught artist, Basquiat’s genius lies in his instinctual understanding of composition, and the immediacy of paper as a medium provided the perfect vehicle for his vigorous technique. Ritualistically layering symbols and marks, Basquiat constricts the combustive color of his American map in Untitled within a thrumming web of white oil stick, alluding to a deeper economic and labor history as dynamically textured and complex as the picture plane. Translated into a sheer visual voltage onto the paper surface, themes of history and capitalism that manifest here in Untitled reveal the impassioned intensity and critical perspective that Basquiat maintained throughout his larger practice. As curator Okwui Enwezor observes, “Even at the young age… with limited formal education in the practice of art, Basquiat was gifted with an ebullient self-confidence, and sought nothing less than to disrupt the restricted equipoise by which the conventional Western art system had governed the public understanding of art.” (Okwui Enwezor, “El Gran Espectáculo: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Modernity, Modernism,” in: Exh. Cat., Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris, Fondation Louis Vuitton, 2018, p. 39)

Artist

Jean-Michel Basquiat