Martin Waller on his choice: Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled
‘Basquiat is the culmination of the 20th-century art revolution. He stands on the shoulders of Gauguin, Picasso, Pollock, Rothko and Warhol – and eclipses them all.The ferocity of imagery and the extravagance of colour means there’s no time for leisured reflection. You are mugged by the immediacy of Basquiat’s brutal confrontation with life.The canvas becomes a miraculous forge where rage and beauty are fused. The despair at injustice and the prefiguring of death are utterly evident.Yet, somehow, the appeal of his own playful charm bursts through. The street-punk anger is cloaked by the astonishing joy of his colour.’
Martin Waller is the co-founder of Andrew Martin, London SW3, which sells fabrics and cultural artefacts from around the world
John McEwen comments on Untitled
The tragically short-lived whiz-kid of the 1980s New York art scene, Jean-Michel Basquiat has proved to be no mere shooting star. In 2017, a ‘skull’ painting of similar dimensions to this one and only a year later in date sold for $110.5 million — a record auction price for an American artist.
Basquiat’s artistic origins, as a vagrant New York teenager making graffiti with a friend under the name of SAMO, suggest a feral childhood. That would be a simplification. He was born in Brooklyn, his Haitian father an accountant, his mother the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants. His father instilled the work ethic and voodooism, his mother an appreciation of art.
Their son was enrolled as a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum of Art and, aged six, entered an Arts-oriented private school. During a childhood convalescence, his mother gave him Gray’s Anatomy, its imagery a profound influence.
Teenage delinquency followed his mother’s commitment to a mental institution, but it was not without purpose. Basquiat dreamed of fame and was careful to spray his graffiti on walls near art galleries. The raw and vibrant imagery — voodoo-influenced ‘fetish’ skulls was a favourite theme — soon had him talent spotted and painting on canvases, not walls.
In 1981, he was included in a prestigious exhibition ‘New York/New Wave’, which included this painting. After the opening, he burst into his father’s house at 6am to declare: ‘Papa, I’ve made it!’
In the spontaneous way of graffiti, always a race against discovery, primary intentions vie with secondary revisions, colour with monochrome, linear details with broad obliterations, although, in fact, the spontaneity of Untitled was spasmodic, because Basquiat worked on it for several months.
Credit: Sotheby's
Jean-Michel Basquiat painting goes under hammer for $110.5 million
Basquiat was 21 years old and still a relative unknown when he painted this piece.
My favourite painting: Peter May
'Vividly coloured sailing boats in a harbour, which I gazed at for hours'
My favourite painting: Amy Meyers
'Stubbs’s portrayal is one of the subtlest and most poignant commentaries on the troubling displacements that were accruing from the
Credit: Bridgeman Images
My favourite painting: Mark Price
'The picture reminds me of her: I swear she is an angel.'
-
How many puppies in the average litter? Country Life Quiz of the DayPlus a 1960s house, Hollywood's most famous cavewoman and more in Friday's quiz.
-
Love, sex and death: Our near-universal obsession with the roseNo flower is more entwined with myth, religion, politics and the human form than the humble rose — and now there's a new coffee table book celebrating them in all of their glory.
-
'As a child I wanted to snuggle up with the dogs and be part of it': Alexia Robinson chooses her favourite paintingAlexia Robinson, founder of Love British Food, chooses an Edwin Landseer classic.
-
The Pre-Raphaelite painter who swapped 'willowy, nubile women' for stained glass — and created some of the best examples in BritainThe painter Edward Burne-Jones turned from paint to glass for much of his career. James Hughes, director of the Victorian Society, chooses a glass masterpiece by Burne-Jones as his favourite 'painting'.
-
'I can’t look away. I’m captivated': The painter who takes years over each portrait, with the only guarantee being that it won't look like the subjectFor Country Life's My Favourite Painting slot, the writer Emily Howes chooses a work by a daring and challenging artist: Frank Auerbach.
-
My Favourite Painting: Rob HouchenThe actor Rob Houchen chooses a bold and challenging Egon Schiele work.
-
My Favourite Painting: Jeremy Clarkson'That's why this is my favourite painting. Because it invites you to imagine'
-
The chair of the National Gallery names his favourite from among the 2,300 masterpieces — and it will come as a bit of a shockAs the National Gallery turns 200, the chair of its board of trustees, John Booth, chooses his favourite painting.
-
'A wonderful reminder of what the countryside could and should be': The 200-year-old watercolour of a world fast disappearingChristopher Price of the Rare Breed Survival Trust on the bucolic beauty of The Magic Apple Tree by Samuel Palmer, which he nominates as his favourite painting.
-
My favourite painting: Andrew Graham-Dixon'Lesson Number One: it’s the pictures that baffle and tantalise you that stay in the mind forever .'
