ART CITIES: Los Angeles-Jean Michel Basquiat

Charismatic image aside, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a prodigious young talent, fusing drawing and painting with history and poetry to produce an unprecedented artistic language and content that bridged cultures and enunciated alternative histories. Combining materials and techniques with uninhibited yet knowing and precise intent, his paintings maintain a powerful tension between opposing aesthetic forces while providing acerbic commentary on the harsh realities of race, culture, and society.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Archive

Featuring loans from the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat; Nicola Erni Collection, Steinhausen, Switzerland; the Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles; Museum Brandhorst, Munich; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and other public and private collections, “Made on Market Street” is the first exhibition focused exclusively on works that Jean-Michel Basquiat produced in Los Angeles. Between November 1982 and May 1984, Basquiat produced approximately a hundred paintings, numerous works on paper, and six silkscreen editions in Venice, California. For an artist closely affiliated with the New York art scene of the 1980s, Basquiat was extraordinarily prolific in Los Angeles. “Made on Market Street” reflects on this consequential era by bringing together nearly thirty works, several of which are among his most important paintings. After first meeting Basquiat in 1981, Gagosian invited him to Los Angeles. Basquiat’s solo exhibition with Larry Gagosian Gallery in LA, was the first time his work was presented on the West Coast and opened in April 1982, immediately following his first solo show in New York at Annina Nosei’s gallery. The Los Angeles exhibition was seen as the arrival of a significant voice by the public and collectors alike. In November 1982 Basquiat returned to California, living and working at Gagosian’s residence on Market Street, a three-story structure with an interior courtyard open to the light and air from the beach nearby. That same year, Basquiat met Fred Hoffman, who was running New City Editions, and together they would produce six editioned prints, including “Tuxedo” (1982) and “Untitled” (1983), large-scale silkscreen works on canvas. Featuring white text, sketches, and directional arrows on a black ground, Tuxedo contrasts with Basquiat’s intensely colorful paintings of the era, its dense collection of allusive phrases ascending to the crown at its top. For Basquiat, working in Venice offered a reprieve from the distractions and pressures of the New York art scene. Many of the paintings he produced in Venice were shown at his next Los Angeles exhibition, which opened on March 8, 1983, at Larry Gagosian Gallery and presented approximately thirty paintings, including “Hollywood Africans”, “Horn Players”, “Museum Security (Hollywood Meltdown)”, “Luna Park”, “Untitled”, and “Year of the Boar” (all 1983). The exhibition presents many of these pivotal works together again for the first time. A highlight of the exhibition is “Hollywood Africans”, a work that portrays Basquiat alongside fellow artists Toxic and Rammellzee as new Black celebrities in a palette that evokes the bright Southern California sun. Fusing drawing, painting, and text across three panels, Horn Players pays homage to jazz greats Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Underscoring the importance of music to Basquiat, it conveys the vitality of bebop in a visual style informed by contemporary graffiti and hip-hop. The same year it was painted, Basquiat would produce the influential hip-hop track “Beat Bop” on his own Tartown Record label, featuring Rammellzee and K-Rob. In the summer of 1983, Basquiat was drawn back to Los Angeles. He returned to Market Street, this time establishing his own studio a few doors down and remaining there until late in the spring of 1984. One night, while Basquiat was working, he went outside to a fenced-in courtyard just behind the studio, where he encountered an unhoused person sleeping. After this incident the courtyard’s fence was removed, but instead of disposing of the wooden slats Basquiat integrated them as supports for some of his most iconic paintings: “Flexible”, “Gold Griot” and “M” (all 1984), all of which are exhibited as a group for the first time since they were created. With “Flexible”, Basquiat expanded his portrayal of the Black male, presenting a larger-than-life figure whose elastic, expressive arm gesture combines the artist’s interests in anatomy, symbolism, and qualities he characterized as “royalty, heroism, and the streets”.

Photo: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Hollywood Africans, 1983, Acrylic and oil stick on canvas, 84 1/8 x 84 inches (213.5 x 213.4 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Douglas S. Cramer, © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York, Photo: © Whitney Museum of American Art/Licensed by Scala/Art Resource, NY, Courtesy Gagosian

Info: Curator: Fred Hoffman & Larry Gagosian, Gagosian Gallery, 456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, CA, USA, Duration: 7/3-1/6/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10;00-17:30, https://gagosian.com/