“In drawings such as these – it is all still happening right before your eyes.”
—Robert Storr

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled is a masterful example of the artist’s instinctive yet conceptually rigorous drawing practice, a fundamental element of his oeuvre. An imposing, arresting figure dominates the composition, arms by its side, staring directly out at the viewer with bulging eyes and teeth bared. Expressionistic vertical and horizontal lines of thick black oilstick intersect with scrawled forms, congregating and coagulating against the off-white paper; there is a frenetic, fizzing urgency to the mark-making, testament to the artist’s belief that ‘drawing was something you did rather than something done, an activity rather than a medium. The seemingly throw-away sheets that carpeted his studio might appear little more than warm-ups for painting, except that the artist […] kept the best for constant reference and re-use. Or, kept them because they were, quite simply, indestructibly vivid’.ⁱ As is typical, there is an immediacy and rawness to the composition that belies a particularly painterly kind of complexity. Deploying his signature pentimento technique, layers of grey graphite and black oilstick clot and emerge from the paper, culminating in a coolly graphic pictorial icon that evinces Basquiat’s enduring, bombastic genius.

 

Executed in 1982, Untitled dates to the very year that Basquiat’s meteoric ascension from unknown to icon began. He received his first solo exhibitions with Annina Nosei in New York, Larry Gagosian in Los Angeles, and Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich, and was invited to participate in the international exhibition Documenta 7 in Kassel, becoming the youngest artist to do so. In the autumn of 1982, the artist moved to Southern California at the invitation of Larry Gagosian, living and working at the dealer’s Market Street residence in Venice, California between November 1982 and May 1984; this heralded a highly productive period of creativity. Untitled powerfully embodies the intensity of this annus mirabilis – describing Basquiat’s works from this year, Fred Hofmann wrote: ‘These figures are unsettling, leaving the viewer with the feeling that they exist in another realm. Peering out into our space, they are oracles conveying a message from another dimension’.ⁱⁱ This can be clearly felt through the searing gaze of the figure in the present work, demanding engagement and demonstrating Basquiat’s ‘fascination with the face as a passageway from exterior physical presence into the hidden realities of man’s psychological and mental realms […] they not only peer out as if seeing, but also invite the viewer to penetrate within’.ⁱⁱⁱ

“I don’t think about art when I’m working. I try to think about life.”
—Jean-Michel Basquiat

Basquiat’s rendering of the figure in Untitled oscillates between interior and exterior forms in a kind of pseudo-Cubist visual game, emphatically demonstrating the signature figuration that would come to define his output. Where the left hand is carefully drawn with an element of foreshortening to the fingers, a black mass pools in the right hand, pulled through veins and arteries towards the figure’s shoulder. Ribs, teeth, spine all appear fleetingly as if X-rayed, with quick gestural mark-making generating an overarching sense of brittle energy. This interest in anatomy can be traced back to the artist’s youth, when he was given a copy of the medical textbook, Gray’s Anatomy, by his mother whilst recovering from a car accident, and can be seen in the recurring skulls and skeletons throughout his oeuvre. In the present work, the figure appears as a composite of forms, a coalescing of geometries and schemes effected by Basquiat’s confident line. It is in this ambiguous tension between internal and external that the psychological power of the work resides.

 

While inherently allusive, Basquiat’s practice was propulsively iconic and iconoclastic in equal measure. In the present work, aesthetic references to the African masks seen by the artist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art are linked through line to a kind of anatomical drawing found in Leonardo Da Vinci’s sketchbooks. In another way, the primarily monochromatic palette and highly gestural draughtsmanship also draw comparison with Abstract Expressionist artists such as Franz Kline. Confident, creative control over signs and symbols, forms and figures, drawn from a broad range of everyday, art historical and sociocultural sources defines Basquiat’s oeuvre: ‘Basquiat’s work, like that of most of his peers, was based on appropriation… the images he appropriated whether they were from the Bible or a chemistry textbook – became part of his original vocabulary… Basquiat combined and recombined these idiosyncratic symbols throughout his career: the recursive references to anatomy, black culture, television and history are his personal hieroglyphics’.^iv In his works, visual idioms are recast and remixed to form a new language. Here, the so-called ‘primitivism’ of these skull-like forms and skeletal figures in Basquiat’s iconography gesture towards artists such as Jean Dubuffet and Pablo Picasso, demonstrating the complex and dynamic way in which he used and reused art historical precedent within his practice, reclaiming a cultural, racial identity for himself through his art.
 

Talismanic in its potency, Untitled stands as a paragon of Basquiat’s singularly electric artistic practice. In a different way to his paintings, the frenetic energy of Basquiat’s works on paper and the immediate freedom with which he draws and scrawls, carves and contours, synthesise his instinctive understanding of composition with his unique iconographic lexicon. As described by curator Diego Cortez, in his drawings ‘[Basquiat] constructs an intensity of line which reads like a polygraph report, a brain-to-hand “shake”. The figure is electronic-primitive-comic’.^v Teeth bared, eyes wide open, this figure transfixes every viewer, delivering a shock that reverberates off the paper.

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Jean-Michel Basquiat emerged as a pivotal figure in the New York art scene of the early 1980s, quickly gaining recognition for his raw and expressive style. His work is represented in major art institutions globally, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris.

 

• In his Untitled drawing, Jean-Michel Basquiat uses skull-like forms and skeletal figures, drawing on art historical precedents from Jean Dubuffet to Pablo Picasso. This ‘primitivism’ is not just stylistic but a powerful part of Basquiat’s narrative, reclaiming cultural and racial identities through his art.

 

• reflects Jean-Michel Basquiat’s deep interest in human anatomy, a fascination sparked by a childhood accident and his study of "Gray’s Anatomy." This work features x-ray-like depictions of skeletal forms that blend external and internal views of the human body. Basquiat’s blend of medical imagery with his abstract style offers an exploration of human vulnerability and resilience.

 

 

ⁱ Robert Storr, ‘Two Hundred Beats Per Min’, in Basquiat Drawings, exh. cat., Robert Miller Gallery, New York, 1990, n.p.

ⁱⁱ Fred Hoffman, The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York, 2017, p. 79.

ⁱⁱⁱ Fred Hoffman, Jean-Michel Basquiat Drawing: Works from the Schorr Family Collection, exh. cat., Acquavella Galleries, New York, 2014, p. 74. 

^iv Phoebe Hoban, Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, New York, 2016, p. 332

^v Diego Cortez, quoted in Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, vol. II, Paris,1996, p. 160.