JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988)
The Italian Version of Popeye has no Pork in his Diet, 1982
Acrylic, oilstick and paper collage on canvas mounted on tied wood supports
60×60 inches (152.4 x 152.4 cm)
Signed, titled and dated (on the reverse)
Provenance
Larry Gagosian Gallery, New York, 1982
Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, 1983
Annina Nosei Gallery, New York
Private collection, New York
Lang & O’Hara Gallery, New York, 1987
Private collection, New York, 1987
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 2007
Auction History
Christie’s New-York: 14 May 2024
Estimate on Request
USD 32,035,000
The finest example of his iconic stretcher-bar paintings, The Italian Version of Popeye has no Pork in his Diet provides ample evidence of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s creative genius and visual dexterity. These unique paintings are perhaps the pinnacle of the artist’s attempts to upend centuries of painterly tradition by establishing new creative forms which adopted the sights, sounds, and raw materials of the urban landscape. Painted when Basquiat was just 21 years old, across this distinctive support he portrays his world through an encyclopedic display of signature motifs: crowns, anatomy, expressive marks, plus his distinctive lexicon of enigmatic words and phrases are used in the service of creating this epic composition. In addition to being an exemplar of the artist’s mark-making, The Italian Version of Popeye has no Pork in his Diet also establishes Basquiat’s ambition to introduce his personal heroes—Black sportsmen, musicians, and figures from the civil rights movement—into the canon of American art. In the present work, he harnesses the sport of boxing (one of the first sports where Black sportsmen prevailed) as the vehicle with which to achieve these goals. The artist’s boxing paintings have become some of his most sought-after works, as they are regarded as sitting at the very top of his extensive oeuvre. Exhibited in the artist’s seminal retrospective at the Whitney in 1992, this painting has not been seen in public for nearly 20 years.
Left: Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait at the Age of 63, 1669. National Gallery, London.
Right: Vincent Van Gogh, Self Portrait with Bandaged Ear, 1889. Courtauld Gallery, London. Photo: © Courtauld Gallery / Bridgeman Images.
The composition is dominated by two figures, one almost complete body on the right, and a bust on the left. The latter figure is realized by the artist applying layer upon layer of painterly marks to build up the requisite facial features such as the skin, eyes, nose, and ears. This labor-intensive technique results in a richly detailed rendering showing each of the constituent parts of the face and how they work together to form the familiar features we are used to. In contrast, to the right is a large black figure, adorned with a wide variety of powerful words and motifs. ‘Bracco di Ferro’ is scrawled across his chest, while the words ‘HOO, HOO, HOO, HOOVES’ tumbles down his body. A discombobulated arm lays over the top, alongside a series of cryptic numbers and fractions.
Basquiat fills the remaining surface area of his canvas with a litany of his enigmatic mark-making. His signature three-point crown is included multiple times, his © copyright symbol (asserting his ownership as the artist, something that was denied to generations of Black artists previously), the word ‘BOXEO’ (Spanish for ‘boxing’), the phrases ‘VERSUS PORK’ and ‘100% PERCENT,’ the outline of the skelly court (a street game popular in Black neighborhoods and a motif that particularly appealed to Basquiat because of its childlike qualities and graffiti-like origins), sit alongside a visual cacophony of more ambiguous words and numbers.
The Italian Version of Popeye has no Pork in his Diet is also radical within Basquiat’s career. It is a racially subversive homage to popular boxers of the time, many of whom were also personal heroes to the artist. The composition contains multiple references to the sport; in addition to the aforementioned BOXEO, ‘BRACCO DI FERRO’ can be translated into English as ‘at arm’s length,’ a primary objective of any boxer in this intensely physical sport. The ‘FOUR BIG’ that is written along the upper edge could be a reference to the four governing bodies of world boxing (the WBA, WBC, IBF, and the WBO) and the organizations whose championship belts are the much-coveted prizes sought by the world’s top boxers. The phrase ‘BUM EAR’ (lower left) could describe one of the physical effects of constantly being hit around the head, and the reference to Popeye in the title is an acknowledgment of the fact that the sport was a recurrent theme in the original cartoon, as the title character often had to undertake a boxing match to prove his spinach induced strength.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Boxer), 1982. © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York
Within Basquiat’s pantheon of personal heroes, the boxer stands supreme. Either posing triumphantly with his arms raised—as in Untitled (Boxer) (1982, Private Collection)—or stoically with arms firmly placed by his side bracing for a fight, the boxer is the subject of some of the artist’s most triumphal paintings. For Basquiat, a champion such as Sugar Ray Robinson represented the striking dichotomy of being a Black man in America. Despite being regarded as the greatest boxer of all time, and one of the most famous African Americans of his generation, Robinson would have suffered the indignity of not being allowed into venues due to the pernicious evils of segregation that were still widespread in the United States during the boxer’s reign. This duality was reflected directly in 1983 (the year after the present work was painted) when asked by the legendary curator Henry Geldzahler what the subject of his paintings were, Basquiat replied bluntly, “Royalty, heroism and the streets” (J. Basquiat, quoted by H. Geldzahler, ‘Art: From the Subways to Soho—Jean-Michel Basquiat,” Interview, January, 1983).
Jean-Michel Basquiat, New-York, 1981-1980, Downtown 1981
However, as with many of Basquiat’s pre-eminent paintings, The Italian Version of Popeye has no Pork in his Diet is a multi-layered work which rewards the viewer by slowly revealing its complex narrative through prolonged looking. For example, in addition to the boxing reference, the term BRACCO is indirectly quoted from Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘braccio’ drawings. In Basquiat’s bastardized Italian BRACCO DI FERRO recalls da Vinci’s textual labels, which the Renaissance artist added to his anatomical figures. In Basquiat’s terms, these references signify a deep aspiration to become like the great Italian; as Robert Farris Thompson has said “the texts in his [Basquiat’s] paintings are, among many things, brave essays in cultural self-definition. They reflect not only the books he read and the worlds he lived in… more critically, they reflect how he made sense of all those realms” (R. Farris Thompson, ‘Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets: The Art of Jean-Michael Basquiat,’ in Jean-Micheal Basquiat, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992, p. 28).
Text played a vital role in Basquiat’s emergence as an artist as, after he dropped out of school, he became a street artist and began spray-painting pithy, often poetic, texts all over New York City, often using the tag SAMO. However, these texts were not random musings of a disgruntled teenager, they were strategically placed at calculated locations in Soho and the East Village, sometimes even outside art openings all with the intention of getting influential people to see and take notice. There were not merely social texts, they were—as Thompson has noted—in essence adverts for Basquiat himself. Thus, in the case of the present work, the words—however mysterious they might at first seem—are deliberately chosen for their visual, aural, or metaphorical associations, all part of Basquiat’s rich and powerful lexicon.
Left: Muscle in the left hand, illustration from Gray’s Anatomy, 1974.
Right: Present lot illustrated.
Anatomical depictions too played a central role in the artist’s vocabulary. Basquiat was a veracious reader, something which his parents encouraged. When he was struck by a car while playing softball in the street as a child, to keep him occupied while he was laid up in hospital, his mother gave him a copy of the medical reference book, Gray’s Anatomy. What at first might seem an odd choice to give an eight-year-old child in fact played to his insatiable desire for knowledge, and also fueled his artistic endeavors as his mother knew that Michelangelo and all the great painters had studied anatomy.
The Italian Version of Popeye has no Pork in his Diet belongs to a distinguished group of works in which the artist constructed his own stretchers from objects he found on the street. By the time of his exhibition at the Fun Gallery in New York’s Lower East Side in November 1982, Basquiat had clearly begun working with unconventional supports. In doing so, Basquiat transformed the traditional notion of a support as a mere ‘surface’ into the basis of a three-dimensional object. Subsequently, these ‘stretcher bar’ canvases, as they have become known, have become some of the most celebrated and sought-after works of his career, with examples in major museum collections including A Next Loin and/or (1982, The Menil Collection, Houston), A Panel of Experts (1982, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts), and LNAPRK (1982, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York).
Jean-Michel Basquiat, A Next Loin And/Or, 1982. Menil Collection, Houston. © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, NY
Jean-Michel Basquiat, A Panel of Experts, 1982. Montreal Museum of Art. © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, NY
Jean-Michel Basquiat, LNAPRK, 1982. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, NY
Painted in 1982, the present work was executed at a pivotal period in the artist’s career. Basquiat had recently undertaken two trips to Italy, where he spent time in Modena. He was initially invited to Europe by Emilio Mazzoli to participate in what would be the artist’s first-ever one-man show after the dealer saw the artist’s work in the legendary New York/New Wave show at New York’s P.S. 1. After the initial trip in May 1981, Basquiat returned the following March and it was during this stay that he painted several of his most respected paintings including Profit 1. It may have been during these stays that Basquiat came across the Italian version of Popeye that is referenced in the present work’s title. The Italian Version of Popeye has no Pork in his Diet is a seminal painting that combines many of the artist’s most important tropes. Painted at the height of his career, it represents the complex and insightful thinking of this gifted young painter. Almost always autobiographical in some way, Basquiat’s paintings are pervaded with the sense that the artist was talking to himself, exorcising demons, exposing uncomfortable truths and trying to explain the way of things to himself—an effort that became increasingly pronounced at this time.