JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960 – 1988)
Campaign, 1984
Acrylic, oilstick and silkscreen on canvas
85 7/8 x 68 1/8 inches (218×173 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 1984 (on the reverse)
Provenance
Carpenter and Hochman Gallery, Dallas
Private Collection, New York (acquired from the above in 1985)
James Goodman Gallery, New York (acquired from the above)
Galerie Terminus, Munich (acquired from the above in February 2005)
Private Collection, Switzerland (acquired from the above in 2007)
Sotheby’s London, 10 February 2015, lot 50 (consigned by the above)
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner
Auction History
Sotheby’s New-York: 13 May 2024
USD 8,000,000 – 12,000,000
USD 10,101,000
Campaign | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2024 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)
Sotheby’s London: 10 February 2015
Estimated: GBP 3,000,000 – 4,000,000
GBP 4,405,000 / USD 6,719,510
Thundering with Jean-Michel Basquiat’s interpretation of Black history, Campaign testifies to the artist’s revolutionary impact within the art historical canon by forging a uniquely vehement artistic vernacular. Campaign was executed in 1984, heralding Basquiat’s arrival as an emphatic artistic force during the thrilling apex of his creative furor. By this stage in his career, Basquiat was confidently empowered: no longer the precocious street artist threatening establishment norms, he rose with acclaim as an acknowledged art world prodigy, capable of producing devastatingly striking artworks that perfectly distilled the zeitgeist of 1980s downtown New York. Belonging to Basquiat’s investigation into racial identity, Campaign belongs to a cycle of paintings from 1984 that incorporate the logo of Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes – an emblem that Basquiat appropriates and repurposes here, replacing its jaunty blonde mascot with the portrait of an African slave to signify the transatlantic slave trade. Towering at over seven feet, Campaign is a formidable reinvention of epic history painting in both scale and conceptual ambition. Here, galvanized by his own Black identity, Basquiat conjures an arresting meditation of African American history and European oppression in his inimitable painterly bravado.
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT ON THE SET OF DOWNTOWN 81. PHOTO © EDO BERTOGLIO
In Campaign, thematic intensity is underscored by Basquiat’s mastery of compositional magnitude and stylistic gravitas. Paired with contrasting passages of black and white, the bold color palette of saturated primary hues imbues the work with palpable dynamism. Deep aqua blue, opaque emulsion white, and thin translucent red electrify the composition, animating the surface in narrow streaks of intuitive fluency. A resplendent field of pure azure serves as the surreal and beguiling stage for a cacophony of Basquiat’s signature emblems: the spiky three-pointed crown; totemic skull-like idols; and textural scrawls, all of which echo the grit of the artist’s cultural environs in downtown Manhattan. An inflammatory declaration of painterly mastery dating from the pinnacle of Basquiat’s artistic development, Campaign bears a sheer intensity that powerfully embodies the artist’s undying legacy.
In the true Expressionist vein of artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Arshile Gorky, and Franz Kline, Basquiat harnesses pigment and iconography for his own means, charging Campaign with acerbic social commentary. In the upper left corner of the canvas, Basquiat appropriates and transforms the logo of a popular cigarette brand, Player’s Navy Cut, into a symbol through which he directly reckons with the historical legacy of colonial trade. Replacing the company logo’s trademark jaunty blonde and bearded sailor, however, Basquiat depicts a manacled slave in unmistakably African tribal dress, with traditional necklaces and piercings. The brand’s name in the logo, too, is replaced by the word “tobacco,” referencing the agricultural commodity associated with plantation slavery. The naval ships that typically flank sailors now adopt a more sinister meaning, referencing the transatlantic slave trade and the menacing specter of European colonial rule. Basquiat heightens the dramatic tension of Campaign by contrasting this satirical imagery with the phantom-like figures in uniform below, whose symbolic gestures harken back to archaic ritualistic iconography.
LEFT: ARSHILE GORKY, AFTER KHORKUM,1940-42. IMAGE © THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO / ART RESOURCE, NY. ART © 2024 THE ARSHILE GORKY FOUNDATION / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK. RIGHT: FRANZ KLINE, BLUEBERRY EYES, 1959-1960. IMAGE © SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM, WASHINGTON, DC / ART RESOURCE, NY. ART © 2024 THE FRANZ KLINE ESTATE / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK
In Basquiat’s barrage of textual and visual motifs, his torrential stream of consciousness becomes the conceptual network for the commentary that he unabashedly sets forth. In the words of prominent dealer and curator, Jeffrey Deitch, “Basquiat’s canvases are aesthetic dropcloths that catch the leaks from a whirring mind. He vacuums up cultural fall-out and spits it out on stretched canvas, disturbingly transformed” (Jeffrey Deitch quoted in: Larry Warsh, Ed., Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Notebooks, New York 1993, p. 13). It is precisely this reliance on eclectic source material that created the waterfall of diverse imagery and alphanumeric mark-making apparent in Campaign. While it resists a facile interpretation, this cluster of motifs in Campaign provides further insight into Basquiat’s working method: more than an illustrative self-portrait that provides a simple likeness, it provides an instinctive regurgitation of the artist’s stimulus – a glimpse into the machinations of his inner cogitation, with its intensity laid fully bare.
20-PACK OF PLAYER’S NAVY CUT CIGARETTES, 1940S
Born to Puerto Rican and Haitian parents in Brooklyn, Basquiat drew from his ethnic background and racial identity to forge a body of work acutely conscious of his place within white Western art history. Unequivocally inspired by the fractured nature of Picasso’s Cubism, Basquiat also looked back to the Spanish master’s interest in African art and primitivism. Basquiat, however, harnesses the aesthetic language of primitivism further, manipulating it to expound upon his own version of history painting, a genre that traditionally lauded the triumphs and glories of Western empire. In Campaign, Basquiat takes on a didactic role by shifting focus to the labor of African subjects that enabled such abundance in Western society. By reappropriating these hallmarks of art history into his unique language and style, Basquiat maintains an ideological opposition to the oppressive systems and demands of that same tradition. “There was a kind of deliberate roughness to his paintings, as if to say: I remain a warrior of the streets; behold the world as seen through vernacular eyes,” writes critic Robert Farris Thompson. (Robert Farris Thompson, op. cit., pp. 31-32) Appropriating aesthetic references to African folk art to visualize his critique on Western history, Basquiat again underlines his position as the prodigious revolutionary, disrupts the predominantly white canon of art, and claims his rightful place as a prophetic voice for our modern age.
ERNST LUDWIG KIRCHNER, SELF PORTRAIT OF A SOLDIER, 1915. IMAGE © ALLEN MEMORIAL ART MUSEUM / CHARLES F. OLNEY FUND / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
Paralleling the momentum of his meteoric rise, every expressive mark and form of Campaign from 1984 is imbued with Basquiat’s impassioned, almost compulsive declaration of edifying artistic intent. A maelstrom of text and images unfurls as a tongue-in-cheek redux of history painting with unbridled bravado: here, the individual elements of the present work are intricately laden with meaning, introducing themes of race, art history, and expressionistic gestural power to the canvas. Replete with the signature iconography, vibrant color, and urban vivacity that are synonymous with Basquiat’s immortal oeuvre, Campaign is a complex and neologistic refashioning of Black history. Pulsating with creative furor, every twisting application of line and stuttering dynamism of form in Campaign profoundly invokes the riotous triumph of Basquiat’s artistic vision.