JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960 – 1988)
Big Snow, 1984
Acrylic and oilstick on canvas
66 1/4 x 60 1/8 inches (168.3 x 152.8 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 1984 (on the reverse)
Provenance
Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles
Armand Bartos, New York
Galerie 1900-2000, Paris (acquired from the above in November 1987)
Sotheby’s London, 24 March 1994, lot 386
Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris (acquired from the above)
Private Collection, France (acquired from the above in 1994)
Dante Vecchiato, Padova
Acquired from the above in 2007 by the present owner
Sotheby’s London: 27 June 2023
Estimated: GBP 3,500,000 – 5,500,000
GPB 4,050,000 / USD 5,164,499
Bursts of popping, punchy, fast-paced, slap-dash imagery whirl across the sleek and snowy-white canvas of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting, Big Snow. Executed in 1984, the work pays homage to the great sporting legend Jesse Owens, who brought home four gold medals in the controversial 1936 Olympic Games in Nazi-era Berlin. Capturing Basquiat’s imagination with his gritty determinism in the face of adversity, Owens came to represent, for both the artist and the world at large, the prevailing of goodness over evil. Yet, as an African American athlete, Owens also symbolized for Basquiat the outdated, oppressive, and ongoing obstacles still surrounding race and inequality in 1980s America. Basquiat was deeply interested in athletic games, and famous African American sporting personalities – from sprinters, boxers and baseball players – frequently populate his canvases. As much celebratory tributes as poignant reflections on the pitfalls of contemporary society, paintings such as the present contend with some of the most profound themes explored throughout Basquiat’s tragically curtailed yet tremendously prolific career: race and racism, high art and ‘low’, history and mythology, celebrity and the marginalized, exuberance and the ephemerality of mortal existence. With its vibrant, energetic and impulsive iconography, Big Snow encapsulates Basquiat’s unique pictorial lexicon which wavers between the vivaciously dynamic and the quietly unsettling.
In January 1983, in the year before Big Snow was executed, Basquiat went on an excursion to St. Moritz to visit his art dealer and friend, Bruno Bischofberger. Inspired by the sparkling, snow-filled Alps that surrounded him, Basquiat painted a number of works during this time that were evocative of the white and wintery scenes he encountered there. Basquiat was introduced to Andy Warhol by Bischofberger in 1982, and subsequently the two artists began to collaborate together. In the same year that Big Snow was created, the duo painted a vibrant large-scale canvas entitled Olympics. In both paintings, the five iconic Olympic rings are similarly rendered in vivid hues against the bright, white, snowy expanse of each backdrop. They allude, at once, to the Winter Olympics which had been twice hosted in St. Moritz in 1928 and 1948, the aforementioned Berlin Olympics of 1936, and the 1984 Summer Olympics which were held in Los Angeles, California, the very year these works were produced. Ever the purveyors and chroniclers of their contemporary moment, it is of little wonder that both Basquiat and Warhol were drawn to this pertinent and globally significant event. Basquiat was particularly captivated by the dynamism and vigour of the sporting world, and felt a great affiliation to boxing which dated back to his childhood when he would watch matches with his father, Gerard Basquiat. As his father recalled, “I was a big fan of boxing, and when he was a kid, there would be fights on television every Friday” (Gerard Basquiat cited in: ibid., p. 15). Countless of Basquiat’s paintings make both visual and textual reference to famous boxers of the time, from Cassius Clay and Joe Frazier, to Sugar Ray Robinson and Jersey Joe Walcott. The latter, a professional boxer who competed from 1930 to 1953 and held the world heavyweight title from 1951 to 1952, is honoured at the bottom left of the present work with a humorous, comic-strip-like caricature of a head which, having just been thwacked with a boxing glove (‘BLIP!’), is surrounded by dizzying, cartoonish stars.
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, BROOK BARTLETT AND BRUNO BISCHOFBERGER AT THE CRESTA CLUBHOUSE IN ST. MORITZ ON 30 JANUARY 1983
IMAGE: © CHRISTINA BISCHOFBERGER, COURTESY GALERIE BRUNO BISCHOFBERGER, MÄNNEDORF-ZURICH, SWITZERLAND
The spiraling green line in Big Snow zips across the picture plane like a ski track through soft plumes of snow. As if traversing space and time, it reads as a metaphorical link between the different sporting events and heroes represented and alluded to in the work. In this merging and coalescing of different temporalities, Basquiat seems to hint at a contemporary world still plagued by stiflingly outmoded attitudes towards race, as in the 1930s. In spite of his own meteoric rise to fame and fortune in the 1980s, Basquiat encountered a great deal of discrimination during his lifetime. At the height of his success, he would famously walk around in paint splattered Armani suits, wads of cash bulging from his pockets, and yet nevertheless experienced deep-rooted racism due to the color of his skin. For Basquiat, this poignant paradox was nowhere better illustrated than in the arena of sports, where many African American athletes rose to stardom but were frequently exploited for their commodity value. Considering this dichotomy, curator Dieter Buchhart notes, “At a time when black Americans were still lynched for hitting white men, the physical victories of black men over their white counterparts were powerful moments in the African American consciousness. In Basquiat’s visual vocabulary, the boxing match thus serves as a synonym for the ‘race war’ between black and white” (Dieter Buchhart, ‘Against All Odds’ in: op. cit., p. 15). This is powerfully demonstrated in an Untitled painting from 1983, housed in the collection of the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, which depicts a boxing champion, arms spread wide in a pose of victory. A halo encircles his head, while his face is ambiguously masked by a white, skull-like façade, provocatively insinuating the ongoing race struggle in America at the time.