Jean-Michel Basquiat, Brook Bartlett, and Bruno Bischofberger at the Cresta Klubhaus in St. Moritz on January 30, 1983. Photo: Christina Bischofberger © Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Männedorf-Zurich, Switzerland.
Jean-Michel Basquiat is so intertwined with New York’s 1980s downtown scene that it’s easy to forget how well-traveled he was. Often spending time in Hawaii to escape the bustle of New York, Basquiat also frequented Los Angeles and Europe and visited Asia. This is not an artist who merely ambled around the same few blocks of the Lower East Side for sights and inspiration. Rather, alongside his meteoric rise to fame, he became a world citizen, making art as he traveled the globe, reflecting the various influences and observations he discovered along the way.
One such work, made on a 1983 trip to St. Moritz, Switzerland, is Feng Yao — sold in Phillips’ New Now: Modern & Contemporary Art auction in New York. Basquiat visited Switzerland frequently at the invitation of his gallerist, Bruno Bischofberger, who began representing the artist in 1983. In his works made abroad, including in Switzerland, we see much of what intrigues Basquiat wherever he worked — how an exchange between African and European visual and cultural traditions can be used to explore racial and class lines developed in America and throughout the world. Switzerland was also a place for Basquiat to escape the noise associated with his growing fame, giving him time and space to relax and make large-scale works while at ease. As Bischofberger recounted to Hauser & Wirth gallery last year, “Jean-Michel visited me in Switzerland, where he particularly liked it. About half a dozen times in Zurich and exactly seven times in St. Moritz, four of them in the summer.”
Feng Yao
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Feng Yao, 1983. New Now: Modern & Contemporary Art New York. Sold for $825,500.
Powerfully striking at approximately five feet square, this work speaks with a combination of text and image, freely merging fine art with Kitsch elements and the visual quickness of graffiti as is so characteristic of Basquiat. Composed of a rectangular paper collage element pasted asymmetrically to a primed canvas, the surface shows two imperfect squares with the text SQUARE DANCES written above. We see the impression of hand smudges along the margins that resonate against this text, as does the square shape of the canvas itself. The text is partially written a third time, misspelled, and struck through like an accented “blue” note in a music score. Completing the composition is the visage of a freckled man with closely cropped, spikey hair. Ultimately, it’s a somewhat humorous work that reveals its depth the longer you spend in front of it. Not only does the work exemplify Basquiat’s signature visual language presented in the artist’s casual way, but it also probes at tensions that would have been in the air in the early 1980s around race, culture, music, and dance — all subjects Basquiat explored fervently.
Square Dancing in the ‘80s
Little is known about what drew Basquiat to include this text in this work; however, given that at least nine Square Dance clubs are still active in Switzerland today, it’s quite possible that the artist was exposed to the dance while visiting the country. If so, we can imagine how striking this would be to an artist so interested in dance and cultural traditions ranging from Caribbean Voodoo ceremonies to the downtown New York dance clubs where he performed.
But there might be more to the story here. American readers may remember Square Dances being taught in gym classes in public schools, as it has been a pervasive practice since the late 1920s. As such, we could assume Basquiat would have experienced this as well. Looking back at how this practice emerged, we uncover the alarming ideas of the industrialist Henry Ford, who began an influence and lobbying campaign in the 1920s with the intention of making the Square Dance the national dance. His reasons were reactionary against jazz music and dance, which he felt were corrupting the morals of his workforce and the nation’s youth. Others took up Ford’s campaign over the years, and it culminated in a Bill to recognize the Square Dance as the “National Folk Dance of the United States,” which was authored by the late West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in June 1982 — less than twelve months before the creation of this work.
One can imagine even a quick news flash about this topic could catch Basquiat’s ear as he worked in his Lower East Side studio with the television on in the background. At any rate, it’s hard to imagine that Basquiat isn’t making a racially and culturally charged statement here while working amid the snowy landscape of St. Moritz.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Feng Yao, 1983. New Now: Modern & Contemporary Art New York.
Much of this work remains a mystery, but with its commanding presence and intricate themes, we can’t deny its charged nature and communicative ability. In addition to references to the Square Dance, Basquiat seems to have intriguingly given the work a title in Mandarin. Further, it was executed at an important time in his career, having presented his first solo exhibition at Annina Nosei Gallery in 1982 and that same year participating in documenta in Kassel, Germany — and later becoming the youngest artist included in the 1983 Whitney Biennial. All told, this work is a testament to how widely Basquiat’s eyes looked, ears heard, mind wandered, and feet traveled.
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