Coming to Phillips from the collection of former professional basketball player and contemporary artist Desmond Mason, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (from Leonardo) serves as a captivating reflection on the high Renaissance anatomical studies of Leonardo da Vinci and is notably one of the few prints the artist produced during his lifetime. Between seriousness and humor, expressive immediacy and historical distance, drawing and silkscreen, Basquiat presents a compelling set of five sketch-like prints that pay thoughtful homage to the Renaissance master.
Following a ten-year career in the NBA, Desmond Mason’s career pivot to art could be better described as a return, having always identified as an artist first and an athlete second. As a child in Waxahachie, Texas, Mason used art as a refuge: “When I was growing up in a bad neighborhood with drugs and violence, art was my getaway,” Mason said of his upbringing. Mason found yet another escape through basketball, eventually leaving Texas to attend Oklahoma State University on a sports scholarship. While at OSU, Mason led a double life as a studio art major who also appeared in three NCAA tournaments; during his senior season, he received national recognition for both his basketball and artistic abilities. his plans to become an art teacher were superseded by his burgeoning basketball career, being drafted out of OSU by the Seattle SuperSonics in 2000, a first-round draft pick. Mason would go on to be a shooting guard and small forward for professional basketball teams across the U.S. – and notably the 2001 NBA All-Star Slam Dunk Contest Champion – having to put his painterly passions on hold.
Mason’s retirement from the court in 2009 meant he could set his sights back to painting, finding inspiration in cultural behemoths like Basquiat, taking cues from the late-artist’s graffiti-like gestures and blazing hues in his own abstract canvases and murals, which the former athlete often uses to give back to his community. The present work, coming from Mason’s personal collection, attests to this long lineage of artistic homage, from the influence of antiquity on the Renaissance, to Da Vinci’s impact on Basquiat for Untitled (from Leonardo), to Mason and his many fellow contemporary artists who hail Basquiat as a master for a new generation. Showing that even unlikely domains have seen the impact of Basquiat’s cultural reach, his artistic influence recently stretched to Mason’s realm of basketball: the Brooklyn Nets, Basquiat’s hometown team, graced their 2020-21 and 2021-22 City Edition uniform with the late artist’s iconography and handwriting.
Provenance
Martin Lawrence Gallery Acquired from the above by the present owner, 2015
Literature
Dieter Buchart, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now's The Time, The Art Gallery of Ontario and Delmonico Books, 2015, pp. 141-145 Ars Publicata, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1983.04
Catalogue Essay
Including (descriptive titles): Youth Beckoning a Right Leg; Plate Ten; Plate 10; Teeth; and Two Portions
One of the most famous American artists of all time, Jean-Michel Basquiat first gained notoriety as a subversive graffiti-artist and street poet in the late 1970s. Operating under the pseudonym SAMO, he emblazoned the abandoned walls of the city with his unique blend of enigmatic symbols, icons and aphorisms. A voracious autodidact, by 1980, at 22-years of age, Basquiat began to direct his extraordinary talent towards painting and drawing. His powerful works brilliantly captured the zeitgeist of the 1980s New York underground scene and catapulted Basquiat on a dizzying meteoric ascent to international stardom that would only be put to a halt by his untimely death in 1988.
Basquiat's iconoclastic oeuvre revolves around the human figure. Exploiting the creative potential of free association and past experience, he created deeply personal, often autobiographical, images by drawing liberally from such disparate fields as urban street culture, music, poetry, Christian iconography, African-American and Aztec cultural histories and a broad range of art historical sources.
1983 The complete set of five screenprints in colors, on Okawara paper, the full sheets. all S. 34 1/2 x 30 in. (87.6 x 76.2 cm) Plate 10 signed in pencil, all numbered 45/45 in pencil on the reverse (there were also 4 artist's proofs), published by New City Editions, Venice, California (with their blindstamp), all framed.