"Since I was seventeen, I thought I might be a star. I’d think about all my heroes, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix...I had a romantic feeling of how people had become famous.”
A cacophony of brilliant color, symbol, text, and image, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Saxaphone of 1986 captures the frenetic and revelatory spirit of musical improvisation and immortalizes Jean-Michel Basquiat's veneration of legendary jazz saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker. Pictographically represented via a tenor saxophone and a hand, the mystical locus of Parker's genius is realized through a frenzy of bold, impassioned marks. Replete with the signature iconography, vibrant color, and urban vivacity synonymous with Basquiat's immortal oeuvre, Saxaphone reveals the artist at the height of his painterly powers, at once celebrating the artist's passion for jazz and visualizing his personal meditations on the cycles of fame and fortune.
Charlie Parker & Dizzy Gillespie, "Hot House" at DuMont Television, February 24, 1952 (in color)
Saxaphone stands among Basquiat’s most iconic “musical” works, alongside such paintings as Charles the First and Horn Players, which rejoice in “the innovative power of black male jazz musicians, whom he reveres as creative father figures.” (bell hooks, “Altars of Sacrifice: Remembering Basquiat”, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, New York 1994, P. 35) Basquiat was an avid listener of jazz and a musician in his own right, and the present work deftly illustrates the relationship between his uniquely improvisational, staccato style of painting and the frenetic alchemy of jazz composition. In both art forms, there is an underlying looping structure that the melody, entrancingly embodied in Saxaphone through Basquiat’s colorful marks and frenetic brushstrokes, floats and skitters atop. In Saxaphone, themes accumulate through multiple references on the surface, emerging as patterns out of gestural brushstrokes, symbols, inventories, lists, and diagrams. Basquiat’s images often have double or triple meanings, many of which are left open to the viewer’s individual interpretation. Rhythms of color and shape emerge within the painting and softly fade out or dissipate in a cacophonous burst, only to emerge again and recombine with new forms in concordant and discordant harmonies. The figures and heads within Saxaphone are composed in a variety of twisting and turning positions, some with their mouths open to indicate a celebration of dance and movement that is further echoed by the brightly colored palette and tight composition. Amidst the flurry of text and symbols emerges a single golden saxophone: the source of inspiration from which the painting gains its slyly misspelled title.
Basquiat’s foray into the world of music began in the 1980s with his band Gray, named in reference to the book Grays Anatomy: the famed medical textbook which Basquiat so often references in his paintings. Basquiat’s band “worked the Mudd Club, CBGB’s, and Hurrah’s in New York, where Blondie and the Talking Heads were at that t.mes emerging. They performed, in other words, at the epicenter of New Wave. Here they contended for space and recognition with a style that, in Basquiat’s own words, was ‘incomplete, abrasive, and oddly beautiful’.” (Robert Farris Thompson, Jean Michel Basquiat, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, 1991). This experience, as well as a lifelong idolization of jazz figures like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Dizzie Gillespie, led to the dynamic artistic ethos within which Saxaphone was created. “Like a DJ, [Basquiat] adeptly reworked Neo-Expressionism’s clichéd language of gesture, freedom, and angst and redirected Pop art’s strategy of appropriation to produce a body of work that at t.mes s celebrated black culture and history but also revealed its complexity and contradictions” (Lydia Yee, “Breaking and Entering,” One Planet under a Groove: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art, exh. cat., Bronx Museum of the Arts, 2001, P. 18).
Basquiat's graphic and pictorial style brilliantly responded to the cool minimalism that permeated Manhattan galleries in the early 1980s. "Basquiat himself did not parody Abstract Expressionism, as Pop Masters somet.mes s did,” describes curator Robert Farris Thompson, “As he fused his sources, his mood was more complex: humor, play, mastery, and stylistic companionship. He brought into being first-generation and second-generation Abstract Expressionist citations and mixed them up amiably with cartoon, graffitero, and other styles" (Robert Farris Thompson, “Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat”, The Hearing Eye: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Visual Art, exh. cat, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992, P. 36). Saxaphone teems with the frenetic energy of the street art scene of New York City while simultaneously recalling archetypes of New York action painting and the vibrant cultural downtown scene of the 1950s.
"Like a DJ, [Basquiat] adeptly reworked Neo-Expressionism’s clichéd language of gesture, freedom, and angst and redirected Pop art’s strategy of appropriation to produce a body of work that at t.mes s celebrated black culture and history but also revealed its complexity and contradictions”
While some of the features of the figures within the present work are mere silhouettes, in other places Basquiat paints them with X-ray vision, detailing the outline of bones, sinews, and organs with anatomical flair. A striking visual technique, these simultaneous views of external body and internal makeup also offer a potent.mes taphor for the Black experience, manifesting the distinction between how a body is perceived and the reality of the individual inhabiting it. The ghostly fragmented skeleton in Basquiat’s figure is essentially mirrored in his deconstruction of language: zeroing in on linguistic phrases with the same kind of fragmenting x-ray vision, Basquiat reveals individual parts and structures, the skeleton of speech and thought. He removes words from their context, compiles them in structural lists, bounds them in rectangles and circles, scratches them out with deft marks. "I cross out words so you will see them more - the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them" said the artist (Basquiat quoted in Eric Fretz, Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Biography, Santa Barbara 2010, P. 102). Within Saxaphone, Basquiat’s most iconic words and signature symbols—the basketball, copyright sign, the “S” SAMO tag, and others—are incorporated alongside fresh materials and influences in the form of language that speak to the artist’s ongoing self-reflection and discovery.
Here, bright yellow line of paint undulates across the canvas, linking Charlie Parker’s disembodied hand to the edge of the image and extending Basquiat’s painterly gesture. The swirling ribbon of color unites the disparate elements of Basquiat’s symbolic repertoire, tying together a myriad of references, symbols, colors, and shapes into a beautiful melody whilst inexorably connecting artist and muse. Basquiat’s mediation on jazz, and on Parker specifically, reflect a deeper and perhaps even more personal mediation on the nature of fame and celebrity. By 1986, Basquiat’s celebrity status had reached its chaotic zenith; an iconic since childhood, Parker represented a certain pinnacle for Basquiat, a youthful dream that was realized, though through different artistic avenues. “Since I was seventeen, I thought I might be a star. I’d think about all my heroes, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix,” said the artist, “I had a romantic feeling of how people had become famous” (Basquiat quoted in Cathleen McGuigan, “New Art, New Money”, New York t.mes s Magazine, 1985, p.20) In improvising and adapting diverse musical traditions, Parker also emblematized in music the electric hybridity that Basquiat achieved in paint. Embodying the unique artistic fervor and painterly ethos characteristic of Basquiat’s work, Saxaphone is an alluring mediation on life, music, beauty, image, symbol, and word rendered in vivid color and stimulating pictorial line.
