(Un)Masked: Jean-Michel Basquiat

For most of his life Jean-Michel Basquiat fought against social expectations and pressures imposed upon him as a result of his cultural identity. Born to mixed race parents, his father Haitian and mother first-generation Puerto Rican, Basquiat’s racial identity was often misunderstood. Despite an upbringing offering middle-class benefits, Basquiat assumed a more underprivileged appearance, wearing torn clothes and pursuing an interest in graffiti street art. Basquiat embraced his African-Americanness and the stereotypical social assumptions regarding Black youth. He rebelled; he fought against institutions and social structures, turning to the streets for his artistic outlet. Basquiat began his creative expression by tagging New York City with his street name, SAMO (“Same Old Shit”).

At this time, the late 1970s into the 80s, high art returned to abstracted figurative painting during the Neo-expressionist movement. At a technical level, this movement emphasized vivid colors painted in a rough, emotive style. Basquiat’s aesthetic fit perfectly within this genre—he acted as a key figure in developing the movement. Basquiat channeled his talent and drive into socio-political driven paintings sensitive to matters of racism, prejudice, and inequality. Characterized as primitive and art-brutish, Basquiat’s paintings integrated a unique symbolism with components of his African heritage.

Painting helped Basquiat navigate personal struggles with self-identification, an escape from mainstream portrayals of Blackness. His art visualized his self-alienating behaviors; the creative process became a self-reflexive investigation. Despite his acceptance within the art community, Basquiat remained an outsider, “the only black in a sea of white.”[1] This perceived ostracism caused Basquiat to reflect on Black history in a journey to create his own identity. 

Basquiat painted the realities of Black histories, juxtaposed with fabricated myths, to illuminate how African-American identities are constructed and absorbed into a collective history. Basquiat’s 1984 painting Zydeco is a visual inquisition into African-American identity and conceptions of Blackness. Zydeco refers to an energetic music style popular in the South which combines traditional and contemporary music aesthetics. This painting, consequently, focuses heavily on how the past effects present day awareness of Black identity. Basquiat opposes safe representations of Blackness by exposing stereotypes--using text, symbols, and myths associated with this demographic. Zydeco features a sole Black musician to represent the larger African-American community. This anonymous musician stands in the middle of three panels, surrounded by text and symbols which reference mainstream media’s commodification of ‘Blackness’ (in the right-hand panel) and the oppression of large corporations, such as Westinghouse, as a reminder of slavery. Basquiat’s Black identity, he reveals, is obscured by associative words such as ‘pick-axe’ and ‘wood’ which allude to the manual labor of a victimized past.

The two groupings of alien-like heads at the top-left and bottom-right corners of the painting help illuminate the theme of masked identity. These masks, generalized and outlined in white, exhibit Basquiat’s negotiations with white conceptualizations of blackness. This focus on the external, facial features, heads, etc., stems from an innately personal space. As art critic Robert Hughes speculated, Basquiat “could only rehearse his own stereotypes, his pictorial nouns for ‘head’ or ‘body’ over and over again.”[2] Basquiat also applies this simplification of elements in his use of color, layering yellow, blue, red, back, and white against a predominantly green background. These primary colors simplify the imagery and overall message of the painting to its most basic and rudimentary level. Each symbol stands distinct from the others, yet the painting achieves cohesion through the repetition of colors and shapes.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Zydeco, 1984

Acrylic and oilstick on canvas

(Un)Masked introductory text: http://artscurated.blogspot.com/2012/04/unmasked.html

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[1] Cora Marshall, “Jean-Michel Basquiat, Outsider Superstar,” International Review of African American Art, 16 no. 4 (1999): 33.

[2] Cora Marshall, “Jean-Michel Basquiat, Outsider Superstar,” International Review of African American Art, 16 no. 4 (1999): 35.