Jean-Michel Basquiat painting, 1983. Photograph: © Roland Hagenberg
There are a few artists that become synonymous with a time and a place. New York City in the 1980s and its artists were one such time and place. On the subways, streets, and fine art galleries, artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat defined a neo-expressionist art movement built on activism, identity, and the blurred line between street art and fine art.
Basquiat, an American artist of Puerto Rican and Haitian descent, embodied the frenetic energy of the graffiti and punk-music permeated streets of 1980s New York. His artwork is steeped in it—from the stream of consciousness comments included among his paintings, to the corybantic crossing outs, from the intellectual voraciousness behind his artwork to the feverish, childlike linework, his style has become instantly recognizable.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Pigeon Anatomy), 1983, ink, chalk and oil on paper, Museum purchase with funds provided by the Nancy Woodson Spire Foundation
Now, visitors to the Woodson Art Museum can experience that time and place in the here and now. Basquiat’s Untitled (Pigeon Anatomy) recently joined the Museum’s permanent collection as the first work by that artist in the collection. The artwork walks the line between schematic and joyful mark making. Between two outspread wings, Basquiat identifies his diagrammatic subject twice as “pigeon wings,” once in red, and once in black chalk, which the artist later crosses out. A list of ten birds—gull, heron, hawks, and owls are legible—is frantically occluded behind swaths of black ink. Thick daubs of oil paint capture the artist at work; it looks as if he was mixing the paint for the half-colored left wing on the artwork itself. An anatomical label of the scapulas’ location appears above the right wing. Anatomy was a lifetime fascination of the artist, and here he has turned his interest to an avian subject.
Throughout, (Untitled) Pigeon Anatomy reinterprets the anatomical scientific illustration into the language of neo-expressionism as only Basquiat could.
Detail, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Pigeon Anatomy), 1983, ink, chalk, and oil on paper
