JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988)
Untitled (Pablo Picasso), 1984
Acrylic and oilstick on metal
35 5/8 x 35 5/8 inches (90.5 x 90.5 cm)

Provenance
Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York.
Robert Miller Gallery, New York.
Anon. sale, Christie’s New York, 9 November 2005, lot 562.
Private Collection, New York (acquired at the above sale).
Anon. sale, Christie’s London, 8 February 2007, lot 22.
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner.

 

Auction History

Christie’s London: 28 June 2023
Estimated: GBP 4,500,000 – 6,500,000
GBP 6,462,500 / USD 8,164,877

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988), Untitled (Pablo Picasso) | Christie’s

Christie’s London: 8 February 2007
Estimated: GBP 350,000 – 550,000
GBP 1,028,000 / USD 2,013,150

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) , Untitled (Pablo Picasso) | Christie’s

Christie’s New-York: 9 November 2005
Estimated: USD 400,000 – 600,000
USD 856,000

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) , Untitled (Pablo Picasso) | Christie’s

 

Included in the 2017-2018 retrospective Basquiat: Boom for Real at the Barbican Gallery, London, Untitled (Pablo Picasso) (1984) is a bold tribute from one twentieth-century titan to another. Painted and drawn in oil, acrylic and oilstick on a square metal panel, Basquiat’s Picasso emerges in vivid color. His trademark striped shirt is a stack of red and white brushstrokes, bright against the buff-colored backdrop. Delicate black and green oilstick shades his features; pink scrawls bring out the paleness of his skin. Thickets of blue highlight his hair and burst in a storm-cloud above his head, as if picturing the buzz of his mind. The word ‘FAMOUS’ can be glimpsed amid the blue. ‘PABLO PICASSO’ is written seven times like an incantation, and the legend ‘PICASSO AT 15 YEARS / PICASSO AS A FIFTEEN YEAR OLD’ can be seen, partly obscured, on his chest. Basquiat conflates timelines, depicting a youthful Picasso in the iconic Breton-striped guise of his older self. The work is also something of a self-portrait. Basquiat—aged just twenty-three when he made this picture—identifies implicitly with his hero, who also showed extraordinary talent from a young age. Revealing his complex relationships with fame, ambition and Western art history at large, Basquiat considers his own future place among the masters.

Basquiat acknowledged Picasso as one of his most important influences. He recalled Guernica (1937), which was on display at MoMA in New York until 1981, being his favorite artwork as a child.  By 1985, he had a small Picasso oil painting in his own collection. Perhaps the first bona fide artist celebrity of the modern era—charismatic, regal and frequently photographed—Picasso was a model in his stardom as well as in his prodigious artistic output.

“Since I was 17, I thought I might be a star… I’d think about all my heroes, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix … I had a romantic feeling of how people had become famous.”

His works often memorialized these Black heroes, including boxers, baseball players, and musicians. He blurred their identities with his own. The field of modern painting, however, provided few Black precedents. Basquiat wanted to make his mark in an overwhelmingly white arena.

Basquiat’s young-old Picasso appears to have been based on two different visual sources, likely found in one of his books about the artist. The face derives from a portrait of Picasso taken in 1896, when he was fifteen years old. The Breton shirt became part of Picasso’s image much later, and was immortalized in a famous photoshoot by Robert Doisneau in 1952. Bringing aspects of these two eras into a single persona, Basquiat develops the theme of a work on paper he made in the same year, titled Young Picasso. There, the artist’s youthful and older faces are drawn side by side. The watchful ‘YOUNG PICASSO’ is finely featured in ochre, while the livid red visage of ‘OLD PICASSO’ has been scribbled out. In the present work, the young face is shaded with even greater care, as if Basquiat is trying out one of Picasso’s more naturalistic styles for himself. But it is also heavier than in the drawing. His features are overlaid by dark lines, squaring off the jaw and opening the mouth into a slight grimace. With the cloud of fame hovering over him, this hybrid Picasso seems older than his years, and troubled by the premonition of his greatness.