Basquiat

When one thinks about the Pop art movement the artists that come to mind are Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein. In the late 1970’s and 1980’s the pop art movement embraced kitsch, familiarity, and attempted to remove art from it’s current home, the pedestal. The art world had become a media-frenzy, where artists became celebrities and the pressure to create, and to sell was immense. During this time a young new street artist named Jean-Michel Basquiat sprung upon the scene gaining attention for his loud, aggressive work. Quickly becoming the art world darling, Basquiat, who had not been formally trained as an artist, had the ability to interlace African-American culture, popular music, sports figures, social commentary and the history of jazz into his work. Although Basquiat was African-American his work was not necessarily “black art” and considered to be aligned with Abstract Expressionism and Pop[1], I will show in this essay is that the art of this young artist was more closely related to the ideas of the Primitive genre. In this essay we consider two paintings by Basquiat, Flexible (Fig. 1) created in 1984 and Blue Gyp Stock (Fig. 2) created in 1983. In these two pieces we will see how Jean-Michel Basquiat toyed with Primitivism through his expression of racism within modern society, his nature as an untrained artist, and because he embodied his surroundings, emotions, and instincts into his work.

Primitivism is the simplistic understanding of how white society saw black (and other ethnic) cultures and is considered to be a behavior, or emotion, that is not based on reason. In other (kinder) words, Primitivism is considered instinctive such as totemic African carvings were in that they were not based on an exact study of the figure[2]. The art world of critics, gallery owners, celebrities, and fellow artists did not realize that Basquiats own upbringing mirrored their own. Though thought to be a son of the streets Basquiat was really the...