In this essay I will be addressing and analysing the underlying themes and ideas within Basquiat's artworks, specifically ‘Cabeza’. The painting’s theme is an attack on racism. Basquiat has an unexpected way of addressing this, through underlying themes and metaphors of oppression. Basquiat’s work not only addresses racial injustice but also deals with police brutality and class prejudice. He critiques social prejudices and the negligence of political history through carefully chosen words and motifs, inspired from his trilingual vocabulary. He breaks down rigid categorization of types of art: his painting technique encompasses diverse styles including tribal art, graffiti, collage and expressionism . In this essay I will address the effect Basquiat's unorthodox work and style had on the social and artistic progression of the time and how it has become accepted over time. What was shocking at the time of creation, has now become more accepted and understood.
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) was born in New York. His father was born in Haiti, and his mother was a native New Yorker, but of Puerto Rican heritage. Hence he grew up speaking French, Spanish, French and English. Basqiat started his artistically renowned life as a graffiti artist in New York City. He created art that exposed his own life alongside socio-political issues such as racism, violence and greed. His inspirations were drawn from his Haitian background combined with his interpretation of 80’s New York and popular culture. Prior to recognition as an artist, Basquait and a friend Al Diaz were identified as the graffiti artists behind the SAMO© tag - this graffiti became renowned across NY for its challenging and sometimes confusing messages. The usual explanation is that SAMO stood for ‘same old shit’, but it could also be seen it as a play on words for SAMBO, a derogatory term for people of mixed heritage. These stags topped in the mid 1980’s when Basquait identified himself as the artist behind the tag. From this point his artistic styles can be divided into three periods: (a) 1980 to early 1982 where most of his paintings were of skeletal figures and related to death, (b) 1982 to 1985 where he focussed on ethnic identity, and (c) the final few years before his death when he created distinctive painterly figures on plain backgrounds.
Sadly Basquit died of a heroin overdose in 1988 at the age of 27.
Basquiat was just twenty-two in 1982, when he was discovered by the New York art dealer Annina Nosei. Annina gave Basquiat access to a studio, large canvases and high quality paint. Before then Basquiat had created art on the streets of East Town, New York, on any surface he could find. 1982 saw Basquiat’s shift, from little-known street artist to someone who worked in a studio, presenting his art to the world via prestigious galleries. 1982 was the year Basquiat produced his highest selling artwork, ‘untitled’ which recently sold for 110 million dollars. Another untitled piece went for 77.3 million and ‘dustheads’ sold for 48.8 million.
Basquiat is often recognized for his unprecedented rise to fame and, shortly afterwards, his tragic downfall and death. His work and persona were perceived as a rebellious outcast street artist, who was against the establishment and all it stood for, critiquing the rich and those in power. Therefore he faced a lot of criticism when he made the move from street to studio, giving the impression that he was leaving his roots behind him. At around the same time graffiti was seen on the streets of New York stating that SAMO was dead.
The satirical copyright logos which he put on his street works were now inside establishment galleries. He had created SAMO and used copyright symbols on his street works ironically, nobody owned his graffiti work, not even him. He said, for example:
“SAMO FOR THE SO-CALLED AVANT-GARD; SAMO AS AN END TO POLICE”.
This statement has now been reversed, these logos were in galleries being sold to the rich, those he had been criticising. As Archille Bonito Oliva said: “These graffitis are an answer, an endeavour, to take back the urban space and their codes. To self manage them. Self management continues by totally upsetting the models.” .
But I wonder how much of a change it really was. I have read that Basquiat used to strategically place his street art, choosing to put it in the places where artists and collectors gathered, such as galleries and museums. Maybe he planned his career carefully. In 1978, the magazine “Village Voice” referred to this as his way of getting notice.
The graffitis he once used as a form of vandalism against the high end art galleries around Soho and lower east side were now transformed into paintings created and delivered, often on demand, for clients and the avant-garde market. Basquiat explained elements of this new life as being: “like a factory, a sick factory” and he objected to being a “gallery mascot”. He was seen to slash a roomful of his own paintings.
1982 was a significant turning point for Basquiat and accordingly, also for the world of art. His first gallery exhibition in 1982 was called ‘New Art, New Money’ and was received favourably by some following great reviews in Flash Art magazine. The New York Times was later involved in questioning the validity of these reviews based on the investment in Basquiat's work by the owner of Flash Art. So potentially, this was a self-serving review.
However it was in this exhibition that he first showed Cabeza.
The roots of ‘Cabeza’ lie in his self-identification as an African-American man enduring social injustice in America.
The piece is a colour-screenprint from Lenox Museum Board using a Saunders 410 hot press.
The work has bright colours and bold lines. The luminous garish yellow background consumes the flat, black foreground. Basqiat’s use of colour and line links to the wider theme of color in art being an indication of difference in society, and his strong identification as a black American.
As well as this being a reflection of Basquit’s own experience, he also provides the audience with this imagery as a “springboard to deeper truths about an individual” raising open-ended questions opposed to creating and forcing upon the viewer a single correct answer. Different people see different things in the work, depending on their own background and perspective.
In the work we see the rough outline of a figure with the mismatched textured background by turns overpowering and framing the figure. The background’s texture is reminiscent of a weaving patterns or hatching - which makes me think of tribal works. The face is also almost like a mask, hiding the real emotions, hiding his heritage just as many before have had to do. The representation of the mask is another link to his tribal interests and the figure could be displaying this in pride or representing a part of a society where that is all humans of different races are.
Another motif is the word “AOPKHES” which is branded in white on the left side of the figure’s blackened chest. No one knows for sure what Basquit meant with this word. There are various interpretations. It could be connected to the French word ‘apache’ which means a violent street ruffian. This could be a reflection back to Basquit’s youth, when he may have been perceived like that. Basquiat was known for his careful and poignant choice of what some would perceive as random words. He used them to make a point, often about social justice, such as his references to plutonium and an S in a triangle in his pictures of ‘Jesse’ and ‘Jawbone is as ass’ (only later acknowledged as a link to Superman the Marvel Comic character). Another interesting point with the word is the fact that slaves in America were forbidden to read, in case it caused rebelliousness. The use of a word, that people cannot understand, could be seen as a reference to the repression of slavery, something in the consciousness of all black Americans.
Basquiat’s interest in anatomy is present in this work. His works often depict organs and body parts and his intertwining labyrinth of lines is reminiscent of a body’s structure of veins and arteries. This interest is thought to stem from his childhood, when he was in a car accident. He broke his arm and suffered head injuries. Whilst recovering he read ‘Gray's Anatomy’. The blotchy colouring on the head in ‘Cabeza’ and the figure’s missing right arm could be seen as a connection to this childhood injury. The details on the figure’s chest shows this interest - the misplaced ribcage misplaced and protruding to one side make way for the subject’s heart and organs. This draws the audience's attention and emphasises the reality and importance of the figure’s heart. The heart is often used in art as a symbol of emotion, and it could be a play on the heartlessness of racism. The connection between Basquiat being a child when his interest in anatomy started and the connection of innocence of children is pivotal and Basquiat is reflecting this into the figure who is in a world surrounded by unjustified power and pain.
Furthermore in this painting Basquiat shows us the workings of us, the human race, as an art form by allowing the rib cage to be presented as a beautiful interior architecture. The blackness of the body satirically comments on the concept of black being representative of death and decay in many other works of art, whilst the contrasting yellow is a colour often used to indicate sunshine and happiness. The figure is displayed with their internal organs out - is this an x-ray into his insides, a cruel mutilation, or an image of him lying dead on an autopsy table. This piece is about perception and questioning our inner workings and prejudices - how do we see this figure and what does this say about us as the viewer?
Despite Basquiat’s keen interest in anatomy the head of the person is unshaded and incomplete; the teeth are in a grimace and divide in the middle the colours becoming the negatives of each other. On one level this is a reaction which mimics the incompleteness and re-writing that happened to Black history. Finally, and more literally, the absent parts of this piece may be the effect of printing which is subsequently used as an ironic comment against races all being the same.
The print is 169.5cmx154.5cm which is roughly the same size as an average man. This gives it a powerful effect on the audience, as if the figure is standing in front of you in the same room. This makes the issues more real, to put it bluntly, the issues in the picture, of race, money and power are right in front of the viewer ‘in their face’.
Later Basquiat and Andy Warhol painted a collaborative piece called ‘two cabeza’. This was a development of Basquiat’s ‘cabeza’ drawing many similarities to the original. For example, a division in the middle separates the two heads which is similar to the sense of division in the original and there seems to be many underlying themes relating to racism.
Cabeza is part of a collection of four prints released by the Basquiat estate representing his favourite paintings. Basquiat refused to sell any of them. The other prints are: ‘Charles the first’ “jawbone of an ass’ and ‘rome pays off’, they were all created 1982, and they are all printworks, which was not a common medium for Basquiat. Many criticise this development by Basquiat however it is actually what revolutionised his artwork, the creations became more directed at tackling racism, growing both in political revolts and his unique artistic style.
Contrary to expectations, the pieces he was creating following ‘New Art, New Money’ were being collected and displayed by the very people he was commenting on in his artworks. He was arguably rebelling against the system by mocking the people who were paying him money.
The level of visual poetry in Basquiat’s art confused many, his scribbled words created questions which were never answered, provoking many to disassociate with his pieces and messages. We can see examples of this is ‘Cabeza’ where we can see black paint dripping down the canvas as if the figure was never given time to settle. Some could see this as a flaw, but others see it as a strength - and a metaphor for his race and for slavery, where people were not free to settle if they chose to do so.
As Basquiat’s said ”The black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings. I realized that I didn't see many paintings with black people in them”.
Basquiat’s unique style was often criticised as childish and careless. When his work was sold for sums similar to that of Picasso “He’s now in the same league as Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso,” said the dealer Jeffrey Deitch many questioned this idea, asking whether his work was as great as Picasso and Bacon, or just as expensive?
In an interview he told Fred Brathwaite “I want to make paintings that look as if they were made by a child”.
We can see these childish features in “Cabeza” as he ignores the lines and rejects a neatness which is expected. Basquiat used criticism as a way of turning society on its back and questioning how people thought and what an insult means or definies. These remarks break down our preconceived opinions we have on art and society and we are given an insight into a world without propaganda or rules.
Following an exhibition in New York in 2005, the New York Times commented “Many images resembles doodles more than they do graffiti and have an air of hieroglyphic reverie as well an electric pop. It’s impossible to locate their precise meaning, and if the larger composition is slack or slapdash, the mind’s eye quickly grows impatient, for Basquiat is an extremely uneven artist”.
Basquiat's work, despite being sold for massive amounts was often criticized, particularly in the UK; Hilton Kramer included in their attack phrases such “street-smart but otherwise invincibly ignorant” and “talentless hustler”. It appeared that Basquiat was being deliberately overlooked by the UK art establishment, with the argument that his art was only suited to cult status in niche New York graffiti art circles.
He also described “The career of the late Jean-Michel Basquiat was one of the hoaxes of the 1980s art boom,” in the New York Observer and questioned the validity of the “an artist of social consciousness, dealing with greed, racism, the inhumanity of American society”.
Through 20+ years after his death the criticism of his work persisted. This could be linked to a general dislike for the excesses of the 1980s. The artistic director of the MoMa was reported to say “People deal with him as a symbol of the period rather than as an artist. And the people who hate that period use him as an easy target.”
Many people saw the depth and meaning in Basquait’s early works. They were directly addressed by Eleanor Nairne in her Heni talk and her curation of the “Boom for Real” exhibition at the Barbican
She was able to demonstrate the relevance of his work in the 21st Century. Greg Tate, commenting on Boom for Real in GQ said “The work is just so predictive of the world that the digital age brought into being. One where everyone’s conscious is saturated all the time, with commerce, or race, or media, or drama, or tragedy, the slaughter of black bodies. All of that is going on in that work – it was work that no one else could have produced.”
Though the success of “Boom for Real” Basquiat become a popular artist in the UK, although his work isn’t held in any public collection or gallery within the UK.
The greatness of ‘Cabeza’, as with most of Basquiat’s work, is how eye catching and unique it is. He broke boundaries within art by connecting styles and techniques from various cultures around the world and history. He brought to life the lost styles of cave drawing, tribal art and imagery of masquerades and carnivals. He stared down the face of ‘childish art” and embraced it. This freedom of expression in the face of criticism is something many artists can never reach. Despite the foundation of graffiti and the challenges made of the excesses of the 1980’s there is still a distinct and very relevant message in his work: his representation of people being anatomically the same and particularly his technique of striking through or scribbling over some words which in turn reinforces their importance over the words immediately visible,a paradigm we could apply to ‘Fake News’.
It’s clear to see that Cabez is a representative work from the early period of Basquiat's work. It presents an image of the growth of young street culture into the traditional artworld and an anti racist reminder that the protagonists of this art revolution were young black Americans.
Basquiat became an icon to those consumed in racial and ethnic divisions of New York. His influence grew from the persona of leading edge graffiti artist into a rebellious artist new to the galleries. As his network grew through associations with the likes of Andy Warhol and others in the art/music industry his work became so popular, it nearly became a genre. As we see Basquiat’s prominence and legacy grow I wonder how Basquiat himself would have reacted to it. He wasn’t creating art to be categorised by his race but to create art. Sadly his race has always been an element of his legacy and name, presumptions clouded his work then and his actions idolised now. In his own words, “I am not a black artist, I am an artist” .
It’s clear to see how Basquiat's unorthodox work and style has assisted in the acceptance and popularisation of graffiti inspired art such as Banksy. What’s the value of critical art, if no one ever sees it – and learns from it? Today Basquiat is an integral part of culture within art to the degree that his work is becoming franchised as you see hats and hoodies being sold with the slogan “aopkhes”.
This movement in status, audience and styles is unprecedented - he created the genre that has been taken up by Banksy.
Overall the criticisms and comments are irrelevant as Basquiat’s intentions were not to please, not even to inform but to release emotions which were being suppressed by conformity to societal norms. This conformity is something Basquiat defied, he said: “Graffiti has a lot of rules in it as of what you can and what you can't do, and I think it's hard to make art under these conditions” . People might presume you had greater freedoms in street art, but Basquiat shows that is not the case. Throughout his works Basquiat makes us question our assumptions.
Arguably, the more something is criticised, the greater effect the piece has created; a piece of art with no complaints has not created enough of a statement. An artist’s goal is to challenge and make people think. That is what Basquiat’s persona and creations were - a criticism of the critiques he’d been given..
Basquiat constantly struggled with the cycle of greed in power and the racism which was laid out before him. He was now rich and disconnected from the life he once knew. Vicious greed over his paintings was growing and elements of greed were growing within himself - as the price of his art rose so did his own power struggle. Constant inhumanity and lack of diversity within this new world began to break him down and this may be echoed in ‘Cabeza’ as the body isn’t filled in, replicating his own defeating self worth. The expression of the figure, a grimace or a smile? Was Basquiat truly happy with his creations or was this expression a grimace reflecting all the new negativity to which Basquiat was now subjected.
In conclusion I believe Basquiat's work was effective with a clean intent. He did not shy away from confrontation and his piece ‘Cabeza’ is an example of this. His work was well defined and carefully composed. Its intention was to change public opinion. He broke down boundaries both artistically and in society, by moving from street art to galleries. It remains as compelling and thought provoking today as it did twenty-seven years ago.