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Lot Essay
Stretching two and a half metres wide, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1983) is amongst the largest of the artist’s works on paper, impressively laden with his iconic, mesmeric visual poetry. Onto a vast surface spill the interior workings of Basquiat’s remarkable mind, a frenetic chorus of text and image which excavates popular culture and repressed history. The artist culls liberally from networks of movement, raw commodities, cartoons, sports, motifs of violence and anatomical drawings of the human body. The crown, Basquiat’s trademark assertion of presence and power, glints out several times across the sheet.
A frieze-like panel in monochrome red oilstick, the present work evokes Basquiat’s legendary graffiti origins, a medium which in the early 1980s was beginning a migration within public consciousness towards high art form. Basquiat, included in the influential 1981 exhibition ‘New York/New Wave’ at MOMA PS1, would become emblem and exemplar of this shift. Early practitioners of graffiti considered themselves writers rather than artists, and Basquiat’s inscriptions on the subway lines of the ‘D’ train were—from the start—socially engaged, intentional and astute. Throughout his storied career, as is exemplified in the present work, Basquiat would produce ‘work that is information, not work that is about information’ (R. Richard, ‘The Radiant Child’, Artforum, Vol. 20, No. 4, December 1981).
Across Basquiat’s oeuvre, sport recurs as a means by which individuals might raise themselves to positions of global visibility in an era of racism and discrimination. The figure of the black boxer becomes a powerful avatar of self-made power within a world premised on racial prejudice and endlessly stacked odds. Here, a triumphant boxer—perhaps the legendary Muhammad Ali, as suggested by the ‘M’ branded on the figure’s chest—lifts his gloved arms and crowned head in jubilation. This is ‘A REAL CHAMPION,’ Basquiat tells us, not only for the match he has just won but the system he defeated to reach the ring. In the present work the boxer is depicted twice, once free and once confined within a box, as bombs rain down around him. While figures such as Muhammad Ali, Jesse Owens or Jackie Robinson propelled themselves to greatness, Basquiat reminds us that their pedestal was often a gilded cage, trapped as they were in the systematic bigotry of the industry, the cruelty of its fans, and the inordinate pressures which followed victory.
‘BASEBALLS MADE IN HAITI,’ Basquiat captions an illustration of four baseballs in the lower right corner. Here, his coded criticisms continue to reveal the injustices woven into the fabric of the sports industry in the United States. In the second half of the twentieth century Haiti—a country that didn’t play baseball—was a ‘giant baseball industry plantation’ shamelessly exploited for low wages and harsh working conditions by American manufacturers and Major League partners (K.B. Blackistone, ‘Baseball has a debt to Haiti, and it’s time the sport repaid it,’ The Washington Post, 22 September 2021). While black sportspeople were touted as examples of what could be achieved in America, they caught baseballs forged through the oppressed labour of thousands. For Basquiat, half-Haitian through his paternal side, the irony would not have been lost.
Diagrams of teeth and jaws recur across the present work, a reference to the iconic medical textbook Gray’s Anatomy. Received as a gift from his mother following a childhood car accident, Basquiat’s early exposure to this text—and to a book of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci—prompted a life-long interest in the inner workings of the human form. Basquiat pored over Gray’s Anatomy, drawing phrases and imagery from its pages onto his own, and adopting its title for the name of his experimental noise band, Gray, which was active from 1979 to 1981. Particularly affected by the brutal murder of black graffiti artist Michael Stewart in the year the present work was executed, Basquiat understood anatomy as a metaphor for the essential commonality of people. His anatomical drawings of skulls, bones, muscles and organs cut against the racism and discrimination of the time, which looked only skin-deep.
In the upper-right portion of the composition is an iconic symbol of the American frontier: a ten-gallon ‘COWBOY HAT’. A nearby arrow points to the ‘OLD WEST’. The West is a recurring motif within Basquiat’s practice, and in works such as Future Sciences Versus the Man, executed the year prior, he makes explicit reference to figures such as William Frederick Cody, or ‘Buffalo Bill’, whose famous touring show popularised the quintessential image of the Old West across America and Europe. The allusion to America’s nineteenth-century efforts to colonise the West takes on new resonance in the context of the present work, with its copious references to raw materials of progress and capitalist advancement. Goods such as sugar, gold, and wood chips are carried across the country on the railway lines which intersect the composition of the present work, fuelling profits and progress.
If the service of justice is to be lauded, it is its reverse—the perpetuation of injustice—which constitutes ‘THE USUAL HORROR STORY.’ This phrase, crossed out to the centre-right of the composition, is no less important for its elimination. ‘I cross out words so you will see them more,’ explained Basquiat: ‘the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them’ (J-M. Basquiat in conversation with R.F. Thompson, 1987, in Basquiat, exh. cat. Fondation Beyeler, Basel 2010, p. xxii). The story Basquiat lays out is one of injustice and discrimination, of odds perpetually stacked against the deserving and disenfranchised. Railway tracks, leading the viewer through the composition, are adopted by Basquiat as a motif of embedded history, while at the same time recalling his first canvas of choice: New York City’s ‘D’ Train. In the late nineteenth century, thousands of Chinese railroad labourers forged through forests, canyons and mountains to build America’s Transcontinental Railroad. Companies such as ‘READING RAILROAD’ listed in Basquiat’s hand employed them for less than half the wage paid to white workers; they were in constant danger from explosives, rockslides and avalanches, and the death toll reached thousands. Juxtaposed against bombs, open wounds, and exploding ‘DUM DUM’ bullets, Basquiat reveals the violence which persists just beneath social consciousness as no less heinous for its veneer of industry and progress. To this day railways carry the raw materials of capitalist production—wood chips, coal, sugar—as the layers of injustice pile up.
Basquiat’s oeuvre betrays a sweeping, multisensory mode of perception, through which the colour and noise of life seeps onto canvas and sheet. Beside a simple sketch of spinal vertebrae Basquiat transcribes ‘SPINAL TAP’ twice, perhaps a nod to Gray’s Anatomy, but equally possibly an allusion to the fictional band Spinal Tap, of the popular early-1980s television programme The T.V. Show starring Rob Reiner. Every word carries a prompt to look, and look again. In places he catches the viewer off-guard: in a light-hearted provocation a large bone in the upper left—rather than a human specimen—is revealed to be a simple ‘MILK BONES’ dog biscuit.
Taking inspiration from newsreels, cereal packets, comic books and cartoons, Basquiat peopled his works with a cast of fictional as well as real-life heroes, such as pioneering polar explorer Admiral Byrd, or Superman’s best friend and journalist Jimmy Olsen. The comic and cartoon character Mighty Mouse is accompanied by a ‘RODENT FESTIVAL’ of mouse peers, whose profiles gaze out at the viewer from across the vast page. Perhaps Basquiat had been watching ‘The Champion of Justice,’ a Terry Toons cartoon episode in which Mighty Mouse defeats a scheming villain to the relief of a colony of adoring mice. As he walked through grocery stores and billboard-lined sidewalks, or flicked through magazines and textbooks with the television blaring in the background and a jazz album filling gaps in the script, Basquiat forged a new way of looking and listening to the world around him. The result was an evocative, urgent visual idiom.
A frieze-like panel in monochrome red oilstick, the present work evokes Basquiat’s legendary graffiti origins, a medium which in the early 1980s was beginning a migration within public consciousness towards high art form. Basquiat, included in the influential 1981 exhibition ‘New York/New Wave’ at MOMA PS1, would become emblem and exemplar of this shift. Early practitioners of graffiti considered themselves writers rather than artists, and Basquiat’s inscriptions on the subway lines of the ‘D’ train were—from the start—socially engaged, intentional and astute. Throughout his storied career, as is exemplified in the present work, Basquiat would produce ‘work that is information, not work that is about information’ (R. Richard, ‘The Radiant Child’, Artforum, Vol. 20, No. 4, December 1981).
Across Basquiat’s oeuvre, sport recurs as a means by which individuals might raise themselves to positions of global visibility in an era of racism and discrimination. The figure of the black boxer becomes a powerful avatar of self-made power within a world premised on racial prejudice and endlessly stacked odds. Here, a triumphant boxer—perhaps the legendary Muhammad Ali, as suggested by the ‘M’ branded on the figure’s chest—lifts his gloved arms and crowned head in jubilation. This is ‘A REAL CHAMPION,’ Basquiat tells us, not only for the match he has just won but the system he defeated to reach the ring. In the present work the boxer is depicted twice, once free and once confined within a box, as bombs rain down around him. While figures such as Muhammad Ali, Jesse Owens or Jackie Robinson propelled themselves to greatness, Basquiat reminds us that their pedestal was often a gilded cage, trapped as they were in the systematic bigotry of the industry, the cruelty of its fans, and the inordinate pressures which followed victory.
‘BASEBALLS MADE IN HAITI,’ Basquiat captions an illustration of four baseballs in the lower right corner. Here, his coded criticisms continue to reveal the injustices woven into the fabric of the sports industry in the United States. In the second half of the twentieth century Haiti—a country that didn’t play baseball—was a ‘giant baseball industry plantation’ shamelessly exploited for low wages and harsh working conditions by American manufacturers and Major League partners (K.B. Blackistone, ‘Baseball has a debt to Haiti, and it’s time the sport repaid it,’ The Washington Post, 22 September 2021). While black sportspeople were touted as examples of what could be achieved in America, they caught baseballs forged through the oppressed labour of thousands. For Basquiat, half-Haitian through his paternal side, the irony would not have been lost.
Diagrams of teeth and jaws recur across the present work, a reference to the iconic medical textbook Gray’s Anatomy. Received as a gift from his mother following a childhood car accident, Basquiat’s early exposure to this text—and to a book of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci—prompted a life-long interest in the inner workings of the human form. Basquiat pored over Gray’s Anatomy, drawing phrases and imagery from its pages onto his own, and adopting its title for the name of his experimental noise band, Gray, which was active from 1979 to 1981. Particularly affected by the brutal murder of black graffiti artist Michael Stewart in the year the present work was executed, Basquiat understood anatomy as a metaphor for the essential commonality of people. His anatomical drawings of skulls, bones, muscles and organs cut against the racism and discrimination of the time, which looked only skin-deep.
In the upper-right portion of the composition is an iconic symbol of the American frontier: a ten-gallon ‘COWBOY HAT’. A nearby arrow points to the ‘OLD WEST’. The West is a recurring motif within Basquiat’s practice, and in works such as Future Sciences Versus the Man, executed the year prior, he makes explicit reference to figures such as William Frederick Cody, or ‘Buffalo Bill’, whose famous touring show popularised the quintessential image of the Old West across America and Europe. The allusion to America’s nineteenth-century efforts to colonise the West takes on new resonance in the context of the present work, with its copious references to raw materials of progress and capitalist advancement. Goods such as sugar, gold, and wood chips are carried across the country on the railway lines which intersect the composition of the present work, fuelling profits and progress.
If the service of justice is to be lauded, it is its reverse—the perpetuation of injustice—which constitutes ‘THE USUAL HORROR STORY.’ This phrase, crossed out to the centre-right of the composition, is no less important for its elimination. ‘I cross out words so you will see them more,’ explained Basquiat: ‘the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them’ (J-M. Basquiat in conversation with R.F. Thompson, 1987, in Basquiat, exh. cat. Fondation Beyeler, Basel 2010, p. xxii). The story Basquiat lays out is one of injustice and discrimination, of odds perpetually stacked against the deserving and disenfranchised. Railway tracks, leading the viewer through the composition, are adopted by Basquiat as a motif of embedded history, while at the same time recalling his first canvas of choice: New York City’s ‘D’ Train. In the late nineteenth century, thousands of Chinese railroad labourers forged through forests, canyons and mountains to build America’s Transcontinental Railroad. Companies such as ‘READING RAILROAD’ listed in Basquiat’s hand employed them for less than half the wage paid to white workers; they were in constant danger from explosives, rockslides and avalanches, and the death toll reached thousands. Juxtaposed against bombs, open wounds, and exploding ‘DUM DUM’ bullets, Basquiat reveals the violence which persists just beneath social consciousness as no less heinous for its veneer of industry and progress. To this day railways carry the raw materials of capitalist production—wood chips, coal, sugar—as the layers of injustice pile up.
Basquiat’s oeuvre betrays a sweeping, multisensory mode of perception, through which the colour and noise of life seeps onto canvas and sheet. Beside a simple sketch of spinal vertebrae Basquiat transcribes ‘SPINAL TAP’ twice, perhaps a nod to Gray’s Anatomy, but equally possibly an allusion to the fictional band Spinal Tap, of the popular early-1980s television programme The T.V. Show starring Rob Reiner. Every word carries a prompt to look, and look again. In places he catches the viewer off-guard: in a light-hearted provocation a large bone in the upper left—rather than a human specimen—is revealed to be a simple ‘MILK BONES’ dog biscuit.
Taking inspiration from newsreels, cereal packets, comic books and cartoons, Basquiat peopled his works with a cast of fictional as well as real-life heroes, such as pioneering polar explorer Admiral Byrd, or Superman’s best friend and journalist Jimmy Olsen. The comic and cartoon character Mighty Mouse is accompanied by a ‘RODENT FESTIVAL’ of mouse peers, whose profiles gaze out at the viewer from across the vast page. Perhaps Basquiat had been watching ‘The Champion of Justice,’ a Terry Toons cartoon episode in which Mighty Mouse defeats a scheming villain to the relief of a colony of adoring mice. As he walked through grocery stores and billboard-lined sidewalks, or flicked through magazines and textbooks with the television blaring in the background and a jazz album filling gaps in the script, Basquiat forged a new way of looking and listening to the world around him. The result was an evocative, urgent visual idiom.