JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988)
Brain, 1985
Acrylic, oilstick, Xerox paper collage and gesso on twenty-seven wood blocks with bootblack stand
Overall: 48 x 43 1/2 x 17 inches (122 x 110.5 x 45.7 cm)
Signed and dated’ Jean-Michel Basquiat 85′ (on the underside of the bootblack stand)

Provenance
Diego Cortez Arte Ltd., New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1990

Auction History
Christie’s New-York: 17 May 2023
Estimated: USD 3,000,000 – 5,000,000
USD 5,616,000

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988) (christies.com)

 

Executed in 1985, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Brain is a significant sculptural work that complements and expands upon his celebrated paintings. It is composed of twenty-seven boxes, each covered with sheets depicting some of the artist’s most celebrated motifs: masks, faces, anatomical drawings, and record labels all combine in an encyclopedic display of the artist’s most celebrated motifs. The structure is then topped with a bootblack stand, of the kind used on the street for shining shoes. Brain transforms this functional object into a readymade sculpture like Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917, Tate Gallery, London), whose scrawled “R. Mutt” mirrors Basquiat’s redacted “BRAIN ©”. The present work is especially important because of its alignment of Basquiat with a history of sculpture. Indeed, “the critics who pigeonholed Basquiat as a Neo-Expressionist painter were not ready for this aspect of his work,” (E. Fretz, Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Biography, New York, 2010, p. 140). Basquiat balked at the tendency to expect the same, safe thing from a successful artist for every exhibition, as can be seen in the present work.

Shown in his historic retrospective that toured the United States after his death, as well as in the more recent survey Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation (2020-2021), Brain represents Basquiat’s engagement not only with sculpture, but also with music and archiving. Glenn O’Brien, a writer and Basquiat’s close friend, wrote of the artist’s notebooks, “Here are lists of fragments and figments, found objects, ready-made memes. Notes but also art and poetry and memos. What does it all mean? Could it be a self-made grimoire, conjured out of thin air and the electromagnetic signals flowing through it?…He was a medium, a magician. His mission was nothing less than the restoration of a powerful spiritual function to art—a channeling of the eternal through the ephemeral” (G. O’Brien, “Books: Jean-Michel Basquiat,” Artforum, April 2015, https://www.artforum.com/print/201504/jean-michel-basquiat-50730). The same could be said of the present work, offering up evidence of Basquiat’s peripatetic imagination which constantly mined television, radio, newspapers, magazines, billboards, and nearly everything else around him to produce an intoxicating insight into the artist’s world.