JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960 – 1988)
Moon View, 1984
Acrylic, colored Xerox paper collage and oilstick on canvas
66 x 60 1/4 inches (167.6 x 153 cm)
Signed, titled and dated 1984 (on the reverse)

Provenance
Larry Gagosian Gallery, New York
The Broad Art Foundation (acquired from the above in 1984)
Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills (acquired from the above)
Acquired from the above in October 2010 by the present owner

Auction History
Sotheby’s New-York: 16 May 2023
Estimated: USD 7,000,000 – 10,000,000
USD 10,790,400

Moon View | The Mo Ostin Collection Evening Auction | 2023 | Sotheby’s

 

At once a critical examination of racial politics and a gestural expression of painterly abandon, Moon View from 1984 articulately synthesizes a wealth of divergent influences with the virtuosic ability that has come to define Jean-Michel Basquiat’s singular career. Set against a backdrop of Basquiat’s unique symbolic lexicon and filtered through his experience as a black artist of rising fame, this dynamic composition juxtaposes signs and symbols from such disparate sources as street culture, metaphysics, advertising, theology, hieroglyphs, art history, and his own Puerto Rican and Haitian heritage. The present canvas is dominated by twin orbs: one, the head side of a 1951 dime emblazoned with “LIBERTY;” and two, a flame-orange moon inspired by Galileo. These poles, together with symbolic ladders, graffiti-like gestures, and African-inspired imagery, offer a psychologically coded meditation on consumerism, inequality, and the cyclical nature of history. From the think impasto of luscious brushwork and strident graphic demarcation of oil stick to the layering of collage, washes of abstract effervescence and the timely introduction of his drawings through Xerox copies, Moon View unequivocally demonstrates the revolutionary strides and unmistakable bravado that afforded Basquiat unprecedented international acclaim at this period in his career. Once held in the collection of The Broad Art Foundation, and unseen in public for twenty years, Moon View is a rare and extraordinary example of Basquiat’s signature artistic practice.

With characteristic semiotic flair, Basquiat introduces the central themes of race and capitalism into Moon View by means of the large white coin image. Rather than featuring the image of a white president, however, this coin is dominated by a highly stylized face in profile, mask-like in its construction and featuring the artist’s signature depiction of dreadlocks, reminiscent of the appropriation of African art within the idioms of Western modernism. Haloed by the word “LIBERTY,” prominently placed on several U.S. coins as a reference to the American dream, this Black figure is sardonically equated with a commodity, or a form of currency to be traded. Paralleled by his own recent rapid rise to fame and the surreal experience of witnessing skyrocketing prices for his work after years of struggling with poverty, the coin can also be interpreted as a symbol of Basquiat’s reckoning with feelings of displacement in an almost exclusively white art world and positioning his legacy within the Western art historical tradition. Thus, Basquiat creates an exacting indictment of the commercialization of the black body throughout the centuries, and initiates a dialogue on the economic dimensions of race relations in America and the history of its art.