How to Look At Basquiat: Three Paintings
Weekly Mourner 3, (Part 1 of a three part series)By screm, July 2020
Why should we look at art? Have you ever asked yourself that? As an artist I’ve had many people ask me that. I think this is a fair question when a person who is not an artist or art enthusiast is confronted with the art of the 20th century and on. Modern, post-modern, contemporary art, can be like a cultural thumb in the eye to these folks. It often can even feel antagonistic. Still, the question remains whether that is true or false or often true or not really so much... Why should we look at art? My answer:
It will teach you how to see better.
If you take the time to really think about art when you look at it, I think it will inevitably teach you how to see better. That’s a simple answer but a sincere one and, I think, a true one. This American artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat, can teach you how to see better. So I’m going to do something that I think might help my readers to move a little beyond an immediate reaction to what they see... less, “Do I like it or not?” And more, “What is happening in this piece of art. Whether I like I or not, what am I seeing here?” I think this is the most important place to start when looking at art.
If you are driving down the road, for example, and you see a strange road sign you haven’t seen before, do you think about whether you like it or not first? No. You immediately question what is going on in the sign. You try to understand it. In fact, you’re convinced that you need to understand it. This is one important way that we should approach art. If you don’t try to understand road signs there might be immediate bad results. If you don’t try to understand art you might not have immediate bad results, but you might be missing an important sign on the road of life itself. A single piece of artwork can hold worlds of thought within it or a thousand revelations for a questioning viewer.
In order to understand the artwork of Jean-Michel Basquiat you’ve got to see him as a force of nature. In spite of being perhaps the most influential black American artist in American art history he remains a mystery to many. His work itself is a mystery too, maybe even a deeper mystery, than the man himself. My premise here is simple: If you don’t know how to look at his work and you’re an American, you are missing out on one of our nation’s greatest modern painters. He’s got worlds of thought and revelations for his viewers. I want to help with that. So, this essay is going to be a formal and symbolic look at a few of his works. This first part will be formal.
Question: Do you know what a formal analysis is in visual art? I’ll tell ya. It’s when you look at a piece of artwork and evaluate it based on the formal elements of visual art. Question: What are those? I’ll tell ya. The formal elements of visual art are things like: color, composition, media, medium, shape, etc. It’s not an attempt to analyze things like: content, story, symbols, and etc. A formal analysis helps a viewer of a piece of art understand how to see it. We will look at symbolism in the following parts of this little series but for now we’re just going to learn how to “see” art.
Basquiat’s brief career was only brief in terms of time. From 1979- 1988 he made around 1500 drawings and 600 paintings. That’s a remarkable output. Still, what is more remarkable about Basquiat is the trajectory of his work during this short period of time. Over his career his painting moved through definable but connected phases that would crescendo at the end of his life with work that was remarkably focused, powerfully emotive, and firmly couched in and riding on the waves of art history, world history, and culture at large. He was in tune with his immediate world in a fresh and critical way. He was in touch with history in a personal and contextual way.
That’s an increasingly rare ability in our society isn’t it? He very much understood how history effected his world and his person but he also respected the reality of historical context. For a young, exuberant, sensitive, drug using, immensely talented, Haitian/Puerto Rican man moving in and out of Manhattan high society by the time he was 21, that grasp of historical context would prove him a genius.
He began his career on the streets of New York City painting off-beat poetry on the walls of lower Manhattan. He was eventually discovered by a gallerist who commissioned a painting from him on canvas. And while the rest is history and his career took off like a rocket, the energy and power that was apparent in his street art only grew as he moved his career to a studio.
NOTARY
Now, this is really important... take some time to look at the piece above...Whenever I make a comment about the way the artist does something it will help you to stop, scroll back up,and look at the painting again to see specifically what I’m referring to. As you do this you’ll be immediately exercising that new mode of seeing art. Flex those new muscles right away.
“Notary” is a large painting consisting of three panels. This painting, as much of his work does, has a rugged quality to the way the canvas is mounted onto the frame. The corners of each panel are constructed in a kind of cross bar manner to give the appearance of a primitive kind of structure, unrefined and raw. It looks like a stretcher for a sick patient trapped in the woods or something like it. Still, this piece reads as a traditional painting on a large canvas would read in the sense that each panel is the same height and the panels themselves don’t play a major role in the visual absorption of the work. They are not sculptural and the work hangs flat against a wall as a traditional painting will. As with many of Basquiat’s paintings, size plays a significant role as the pieces overwhelm the viewer through scale. This will ultimately influence the way in which the viewer reads the work. You’ll be nearly forced to take in the work in fragments rather than as a whole. In that sense you’ll actually be copying the way Basquiat made the work. Neat right?
This painting is executed with acrylic paint, oil sticks and collage. Mixed media, that is the use of different applications (not just pencils or just pens or just paint etc.) all at once in a work of art, was a go to approach for Jean-Michel Basquiat. The variety of media plays into the artist’s technique as much as anything else. In this work the structure that the painting is mounted on plays more of a media role than it does in giving the work a kind of presence. Note the color of the exposed wood portions of the frame; The ochre/orange color of the raw wood is matched by an ochre/orange paint that Basquiat uses to move the viewers eye throughout the piece. His consciousness of all the elements on the surface is reminiscent of an impressionist painter like Monet. Impressionists would take a color and place it strategically throughout their paintings to make you notice it everywhere. It’s a way to trick the eye and keep it from getting stuck in one spot.
The compositional movement of this painting is as scattered as the artist’s choice of medium appears to be. Compositional movement is the way the layout of all the marks on the surface are organized. What we may take note of is the lack of clear, horizontal, movement first. This painting doesn’t read like a book even though it contains writing. Nor is there any immediately identifiable scheme. The piece tends to read more vertically (top to bottom, bottom to top) than anything else but a closer look at the panels themselves and the broken transitions of paint from panel to panel leads me to conjecture that Basquiat may very well have painted these panels separate from one another. It is likely that this work was done in Basquiat’s loft on Crosby St. in Soho, where he lived in 1983, which would have afforded less space. This would therefore have caused the artist to work on the panels in close proximity but not hanging together as one as they are shown here. Look closely at the break between the second and third panels. There is an abrupt end to the work happening in the central panel and the third panel seems to be almost a new painting. The mint green that moves throughout the piece is present in the third panel but it almost reads as a technical afterthought that the painter dashed on for visual harmony like an impressionist would. The beautiful patch of pink gradient next to the central figure’s head is abutted by a slash of black or navy blue that breaks the transition.
And this conjecture might also be confirmed by the artist’s technique. Basquiat hopped from place to place on a canvas and sometimes from canvas to canvas working on several pieces at a time. I have watched film of him working and his technique is in direct correlation with his scattered choice of medium, color, and the often fragmentary nature of his compositions. He was almost in constant motion as he worked, not standing still for very long. Basquiat uses large swathes of paint to cover jig saw like parts of this surface. If, for example, you the viewer, were to squint your eyes and look at this piece, the dark portions of paint appear to float amidst a rough sea of mint green. Try it. Can you see the movement of color better? Other techniques Basquiat used will be featured in the analysis of the subsequent works featured in this paper but this technique of scrubbing a painting together with large impasto patches of a single color is a well loved technique of the artist and a powerful mechanism to bring expressionistically powerful brushstrokes to a place of prominence while also allowing the artist to work where he wanted to work at any given moment. He would splash and scratch on large patches of paint for the technique of it.
Notice also how freely he applies the paint. He lets the paint drip and splatter and then scrubs over enough of the drips or splatters to give the layering he uses a place of prominence. It’s difficult to tell which layer is the artist’s final layer and this gives the painting an existential quality and divorces it from traditional, visual, interpretation. One can’t divide ground work from a base layer from a finishing layer. And this is Basquiat’s sense of depth. His paintings exist as a moment in time, a kind of capsule of his activity as much as they are an actual image that is communicating something to his viewers. Or think of it this way: He’s not trying to make you think there is some illusion here. He’s trying to make you imagine what is underneath all these piles of paint, literally and figuratively.
Or think of it this way: his painting is immediate. There is no illusory quality here, only literal depth or material depth.
The scratching out of words is used, in a similar way, to emphasize the word and to cause the viewer to look more closely and this is also a play to the concept of depth. Sometimes we look more closely at mistakes than we do at something down properly. This was his explanation of why he crossed out words.
The artist’s technique then is heavily made up of composing upward in three ways:
1. Vertically oriented compositions (this could be read from bottom to top or top to bottom).
2. Upward from the base of the canvas into space in the same sense that a person jumps up from the ground. The material is stacked on itself and this creates depth.
3. Upward in the philosophical sense of burying items to bring them to forefront of the viewers mind. Obscuring that which is meant to rise to a place of prominence conceptually. It’s like he was getting at the urge in all of us to dig for buried treasure.
Rather than working in traditional ways of getting through something, Basquiat has developed his own approach in several ways listed above to lead his viewers to look at his work differently. His work has a “from the ground up” approach in all of those different ways.
Has all of this helped you to look differently at a work of art? I hope at least that it has helped you appreciate this particular artist. Without gushing anymore than necessary I think Basquiat is a national treasure. I’ll conclude with one thought for this first part that may wrap it all up nicely for you:
This ground up approach, this jigsaw-like, puzzle-piece, bottom to top method of this artist is very much how the artist thought about life. It was, indeed, his own life experience as a practicing artist. He went from being homeless on the streets of New York as a runaway, to being at the very top of the list as a world renowned painter. His formal approach to making his work was, in a very real way, autobiographical.
There is more than meets the eye to the art work we encounter as we move through life just as there is more than meets the eye to the circumstances of life itself. Do we practice “seeing” or do we allow it all to simply pass us by? If you’re interested in practicing seeing more, “part two”, a look into some of Basquiat’s symbolism is on the way.
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