Jean-Michel Basquiat - Untitled (1982) - Analysis
I can’t think of another painting which has the energy that is so encapsulated here. This is an artist who has completely thrown himself into the making of the picture. This is Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled painting, although it is known as the devil.
It measures around eight foot in height and sixteen foot in width. It’s an incredibly monumental picture which is epic in proportion and epic in ambition.
The painting was painted in 1982 which is really the prime year for Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work. He emerged on the art-scene at the end of 1981 and was literally propelled from no one to the number one artist of the moment. This was a time where there was a massive rejection of minimalism and this great return to painting.
He is looking at Jackson Pollock, he is looking at Willem de Kooning, Cy Twombly and Franz Kline as his heroes, but he is doing something completely original. This is part of an amazing group of pictures that come out of his work in Modena, Italy.
Basquiat shows himself here as the devil, which on one level is obviously mischievous. On another level it is actually projecting in a way his image as a lone figure. And African-American working within a very white dominated space in the art world as well as in society. You will notice that this figure is skeletal, and if one looks throughout the career of Basquiat the figure of death is very present. This is also coming out of the experiences of his daily life, where he is testing the boundaries of what he can do, specifically with drugs and specifically with a lifestyle which obviously ended with a very early death.
Basquiat was a fantastic draftsman.He was someone who had this incredible ability of describing with the most modest means the fullness of a form with really the minimum of brushwork. He has been able to create something which is totally descriptive.
In this painting in particular you see this total freedom of the way he uses the large expanse of the canvas. He is obviously thinking about that all-over painting style like Jackson Pollock. He is very aware of the emotive quality of color and there is a great bravado and energy that comes into the literal throwing of paint onto a canvas. And then using the spontaneity of that moment and the element of chance to build up his composition in a very confident way.
This painting is alive and has actually a rather volcanic sense. What is so exceptional about this picture is that at the age of 22 he has really created a masterpiece that would then inform everything else he does. The power and the energy of the figure within the composition and this combination of abstract and figuration, this amazing use of color, amazing use of line, these are all things which come together in a painting at the very start of his career and which ultimately are a summation of everything that he would achieve for the rest of his life.