JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960 – 1988)
Now’s the Time, 1985
Acrylic and oilstick on wood
92 1/4 x 93 1/4 inches (234.3 x 236.9 cm)

Provenance
Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above in March 1996 by the present owner

Auction History
Sotheby’s New-York: 18 May 2023
Estimate On Request
USD 28,634,000

Now’s the Time | Contemporary Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s (sothebys.com)

 

An icon of singular, radical artistic genius, Now’s the Time is the ultimate embodiment of the brilliant fusion of music and art which lies at the very heart of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s legendary career. Here, Basquiat recreates the vinyl pressing of Charlie Parker’s 1945 composition Now’s the Time in roughly hewn plywood on a grand scale to form a talismanic monument—both to that revered Jazz musician, who was foremost amongst Basquiat’s icons, and to the greater recognition, admiration and amplification of Black artistry, past and present, that was so central to Basquiat’s own artistic project.

Executed in 1985, the present work announces Basquiat’s arrival at the apex of his international success and the very center of New York’s downtown zeitgeist with three emphatic words: Now’s the Time. This phrase – which has become a familiar slogan within the scholarship and cultural vernacular for the artist – holds more resonance now than ever; like the music of Charlie Parker, the impact of Basquiat’s monumental masterwork is immediate, universal, and utterly timeless, the force of his artistic vernacular as explosive today as it was at the moment of execution. With three words, Basquiat declares his place amongst the pantheon of Black artistic icons he admired, claiming the moment as his own and immortalizing the significance of his then radical, now canonical artistic project: Now’s the Time. Now is always the time.

Now’s the Time witnesses Basquiat radically pare down the explosive bravura of his street art-based paintings into an austere composition of inscriptions scribbled upon a tabula rasa of phantom black wood. His Minimalist gesture radically extends the aesthetic ideologies by the likes of Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, and Donald Judd in the contemporaneous mainstream art world into the domains of underground culture and music, while his sculptural gravitas resonates with the revolutionary subversion and heft of Marcel Duchamp’s seminal readymades. Echoing the irregular silhouette of the wooden support, the lines of his white circles seem to crackle with electricity, vibrating on the surface like a rhythmic bassline. As a final touch, the artist emblazons his signature copyright sign upon the surface: both as a way of giving credit to Parker, and as a means of irrevocably marking the painting and declaration as his own. Testifying to its singular significance in Basquiat’s oeuvre, Now’s the Time has appeared as a major highlight in many of the Basquiat’s most acclaimed international exhibitions and retrospectives, at Brooklyn Museum, New York; Fondation Beyeler, Basel; and Art Gallery of Ontario, where it was the centerpiece of the eponymous exhibition entitled Jean Michel Basquiat: Now’s the Time; most recently, Now’s the Time was exhibited in the landmark exhibition at Montreal Museum of Art, Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music, where it was also prominently illustrated on the cover of the exhibition catalogue. Like a black nova, Now’s the Time asserts its presence with its gravitational pull, luring viewers into Basquiat’s ultimate aesthetic rhapsody on the timeless sensational ecstasy of bebop and jazz.