Sabado por la Noche (Saturday night), 1984: Basquiat's Visual Odyssey

One of Basquiat’s 1984 masterpieces, Sabado por la Noche (Saturday Night), is leading the 20th/21st Century Evening Sale at Christie’s in Hong Kong on 28 March. This multi-layered composition simultaneously captures the material richness and the thematic complexity for which the artist is renowned.

Conjured into being from an array of his signature markmaking techniques, Sabado por la Noche (Saturday Night) is a vibrant image, every square inch of which demands attention. Set amid a colour-field of magenta, yellow and emerald green, two figures dominate. These are both griots, oral storytellers from parts of West Africa whose role in society is to keep their culture’s historical, mythical and religious narratives alive.

What story are they telling here? It isn’t obvious. One thing it is safe to say, though, is that their story is not a linear one. Basquiat eschewed those. His art offered instead a visual equivalent to the improvisation and polyrhythmic complexity of bebop jazz, a form of music he loved.

Other famous paintings from 1984 featuring griot figures are Gold Griot (today part of the Broad Art Foundation’s collection in Los Angeles) and Grillo (today part of the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s collection in Paris). It’s tempting perhaps to see these figures as types of self-portrait, with Basquiat representing himself as the bard of his own experience. New York in the 1980s experienced an artistic renaissance and the nightlife scene played a significant role in shaping its cultural landscape. Basquiat was deeply involved in this scene as a griot himself, and Saturday Night, with its frenzied swathes of colour and bold street-art-style iconography, immortalises the dynamism of NYC in the 1980s.

Born in Brooklyn in 1960, to a Haitian father and a mother of direct Puerto Rican descent, Basquiat left home by the age of 17. The determined young artist moved to Manhattan, where he formed a band, and started creating enigmatic street art around the city.

For the last of these activities, he teamed up with a friend called Al Díaz, the pair sharing the tag of SAMO©. In the early 1980s, when Basquiat’s career as a solo artist took off, the works he created on canvas captured the rawness and exemplified his instinctive grasp of composition as embodied in his beginnings as a street artist. Basquiat’s intuitive interweaving of text and image — in the case of Sabado por la Noche (Saturday Night), manifests in the embedded sheets of paper scrawled with words such as ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’ and ‘birth’, as well as Fibonacci spirals and symbols related to the solar system.

Despite his lack of formal art training, Basquiat had a keen intellect and was a voracious reader. Thanks to his family environment, he was also trilingual: fluent in English, French and Spanish. In rare instances, such as that of the present picture, he titled his pictures fully or partially in Spanish.

This composition has little in the way of perspectival logic or spatial recession, just a buzz of activity. As Saturday nights go, this is one of exuberance, epitomised by Basquiat’s bravado brushwork and bristling lines. The griot on the right even seems to have brought along for the occasion what appears to be a grinning canine, which he holds at arm’s length.

Basquiat was an art-world star by the age of 21 and an active member in the vibrant nightlife scene of New York City's new cultural landscape. Basquiat was deejaying, other times hosting events, and also creating artworks (he painted a mural for Palladium in 1986). 'He lived very high, very fast, and he did a lot ofgreat things,' said the esteemed New York-based curator Henry Geldzahler.

Geldzahler was speaking after Basquiat’s tragic death in 1988 at the age of 27. There was an energy to the artist’s life which was reflected in his paintings and the Palladium mural, Sabado por la Noche (Saturday Night) included.

The year in which he painted this picture was a defining one for Basquiat. It saw his first solo exhibition in a museum, held at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh between August and September 1984. That show later transferred to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and the Museum Boiimans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, crowning his global fame in the process.

By this point of his career, Basquiat was living and working in a two-floor property he rented from Andy Warhol. Located on Great Jones Street, in the NoHo district of Manhattan, this doubled as an apartment and studio, and would be the artist’s base for the final five years of his life.

Despite an age difference of more than 30 years, Warhol and Basquiat were close friends. From roughly the middle of 1983 until the end of 1985, the pair spent a considerable amount of time together, both professionally and socially. According to Ronnie Cutrone, one of Warhol’s studio assistants, ‘the relationship was symbiotic’: the senior artist liked the junior one’s sheer vitality, while Basquiat welcomed access to Warhol’s contacts book.

The pair collaborated on more than 100 art works: which is to say, produced them as co-creators. In their solo efforts from this time, too, each man would have an impact on the other. Warhol credited Basquiat for his return to painting manually again, while Basquiat credited Warhol for developing his interest in the silkscreen technique.

The two men’s mutual friend and fellow artist, Keith Haring, said that ‘Andy was amazed by the ease with which Jean composed and constructed his paintings, and was constantly surprised by the never-ending flow of new ideas.’

Those ideas were assimilated from myriad sources, well-known examples including the 19th-century anatomical textbook, Gray’s Anatomy; the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci; and a recent book by Robert Farris Thompson called Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy (1983). This explored how different African civilisations have informed the aesthetic, social and religious traditions of black people in the Americas.

Thompson was an art historian at Yale University, and Basquiat read his latest work from cover to cover. In Sabado por la Noche (Saturday Night), the elliptically-eyed griots resemble two idol figures which had been carved for a Yoruba church in Harlem in the 1960s, and which were photographed for Thompson’s book. (Basquiat so admired Flash of the Spirit that he invited its author to write an essay in the catalogue accompanying a solo show of his in New York in 1985. Thompson accepted and used the text to praise the way that the artist ‘transforms paint into incantation’.)

Sabado por la Noche (Saturday Night) will go on public view at Christie’s Asia Pacific headquarters at The Henderson in Hong Kong from March 25 to 27. It will be the top lot of the 20th/21st Century Evening Sale at the same venue the following day.

Currently part of a distinguished Asian private collection, the painting was included in ‘Heads On: Basquiat & Warhol’, an exhibition of works by the eponymous two artists co-hosted by Christie’s in Seoul in September 2023 during Seoul Art Week.

Paintings by Basquiat have featured in several successful sales at Christie’s in Hong Kong in the past, notably Warrior (1982) — which sold in March 2021 for HK$323,600,000 / US$41,857,351, making it the most valuable Western artwork ever sold in Asia.

‘It is a privilege to present Sabado por la Noche (Saturday Night), an iconic masterpiece that reverberates with Basquiat’s inimitable visual language’, says Ada Tsui, Head of Evening Sale, 20th/21st Century Art, at Christie’s Asia Pacific. ‘Christie's has been cultivating the Asian market for Basquiat for many years. His powerful work transcends borders and speaks to collectors all over the world, and this sale in Hong Kong is a testament to the demand we see in the region for Western masterpieces of this calibre’.

Sabado por la Noche (Saturday Night) is a stunning synthesis of the world as Basquiat knew it, channelling influences from black history to Pop art, via jazz, the Spanish language and mathematical sequences. A large part of his skill was in ensuring that those influences were kept in perfect visual balance. If Basquiat was a griot, he was a beguiling one, telling a personal tale with universal impact.