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signed, titled and dated 1983 on the reverse

acrylic and oilstick on hinged canvases

PROVENANCE

Anina Nosei Gallery, New York
Akira Ikeda Gallery, Tokyo
Enrico Navarra Gallery, New York
Hanart TZ, Hong Kong
Acquired by the present owner from the above
EXHIBITED

Zurich, Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Jean-Michel Basquiat: New Paintings, September - October 1983
Paris, Galerie Enrico Navarra, Jean-Michel Basquiat, April - June 1996
Kaohsiung, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts; Taichung, Taichung Museum, Jean-Michel Basquiat, January - June 1997, pp. 48-49, illustrated
Seoul, Gallery Hyundai, Jean-Michel Basquiat, July - August 1997, pp. 44-45, illustrated
Vancouver, Art Beatus, Jean-Michel Basquiat, September - October 1997, pp. 30-31, illustrated
Tokyo, Mitsukoshi Museum, October - November 1997; Marugame, M.I.M.O.C.A., Jean-Michel Basquiat, April - May 1998, pp. 54-55, illustrated
Sao Paolo, Pinacoteca, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Pinturas, June - September 1998, pp. 58-59, illustrated
Venice, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Basquiat a Venezia, June - October 1999, pp. 76-77, illustrated in color, p. 118, illustrated in color, p. 142, detail illustrated in color
Naples, Castel Nuovo, Jean-Michel Basquiat, December 1999 - February 2000, pp. 66-67, illustrated
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

Richard D. Marshall & Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris 1996, 1st ed., vol. 1, pp. 153-153, illustrated in color
Richard D. Marshall & Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris 1996, 2nd ed., vol. I, pp. 188-189, illustrated in color
Tony Shafrazi et al., Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York 1999, pp. 208-209,
Richard D. Marshall & Jean-Louis Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Paris 2000, 3rd ed., vol. I, pp. 168-169, illustrated in color, and vol. II, p. 176, illustrated in color

CATALOGUE NOTE

Jean-Michel Basquiat's Florence is a powerful and vigorous example of the artist's forceful expression; both totemic and gnomic, the sheer physicality of this monumental work draws the viewer into Basquiat's rich and complex universe. Florence is a commanding painting that displays the energy, rigor and bravado of a young man at the height of his brief, but extraordinary career. In just under a decade, Basquiat produced an astonishingly vehement body of work: a short career which is being celebrated with a major retrospective that will grace museums this year in Brooklyn, Los Angeles and Houston. Basquiat's point of departure drew on a variegated litany of cultural references, including those from the realms of art, literature, music, television, cartoons, sports, black history and graffiti, to name but a few. Of course, the most potent reference both on and in his work was the creative detritus of his own mottled youth. The artist's response to this deluge of social realities was a barrage of images, text, symbols and materials that, in nexus and juxtaposition, became part of Basquiat's own unique pictorial syntax and was instantly recognized by the viewer. Florence is a magnificent example of such an enterprise.

Two hinged canvases form a structure that is painted in broad, muscular strokes of bright red paint. The aggressive application of paint here seems born from a desire to erase, rather than to make subject or brushwork manifest. The paint seems to have been applied in a frenzy of activity, lending the surface this extraordinary energy. Laid on top of this fizzing surface is a small congregation of heads, typical of the artist's style, delineated in oilstick and filled in with further bold marks of paint. These confrontational heads, looming out of the picture plane, may be seen to signify any number of the artist's concerns, with himself as an artist or as a person of color working in a field that was (and remains) dominated, both commercially and intellectually, by white men. These heads, resolute in their concreteness, contrast with the network of oilstick text that meanders across the composition. Basquiat has here created a family tree, showing birth and death dates for members of the Medici clan: a family dynasty that ruled the city state of Florence during the Renaissance for over two hundred years and which included three Popes and two Queens of France and became the inspiration for Niccolo Macchiavelli's infamous The Prince.

Basquiat was influenced by an array of sources, one of which was the arts of the Renaissance, specifically the work of Leonardo. Indeed, a number of Basquiat's paintings pay homage to the genius of Leonardo (Basquiat was most enamored with Leonardo's drawings, specifically his scientific studies and character heads). Here, rather than focus on any individual Renaissance artist, he takes the concept of the city state of Florence as his starting point. The Florence he abstractly refers to reflects the violence, passion and internal competition of a family at war with itself (numerous members were killed by other members of the Medici family) and, ultimately, with the whole of Italy. The scarlet background upon which the family tree is delineated can be seen to signify the blood let by the warring factions of the Medicis. The 'family tree' motif had been employed by the artist in a number of drawings; using it to somehow link together disparate objects, characters and thoughts akin to a flow chart of ideas. This same principle of investigation and contemplation operates in the present work. It is as if this family tree becomes a landscape of personalities, against which he depicts his own image. Interestingly, the Medicis are famed, above all else, as the art patrons of the Renaissance (arguably the most fecund period of art history). Perhaps it is with that in mind that Basquiat executed the present work, equating their voracious appetite for success with an equally strong desire to own objects that materially displayed their power and status. Perhaps Basquiat saw himself as a modern-day Leonardo in a Florence that, during the 1980's, was now called New York.

The multilaminated hinged surface, both physically and metaphorically, serves to problematize the identity of the object. Not quite a sculpture, but certainly a painting, Florence hovers in that indeterminate intellectual space between the boundaries of two and three-dimensional art. By painting on a hinged canvas, the artist already feeds the history of that object into the intellectual thrust of the work he creates. More incantations of the past thus add to the cacophony of jazzy forms he here creates and which are mobilized through his itchy linearity.