New York’s Getting Yet Another Basquiat Show, This Time for the Artist’s Xeroxed Works

Didn't snag one of the 50,000 tickets for the Brant Foundation's sold-out Basquiat show? Don't despair.

Eileen Kinsella, March 12, 2019 ArtNetNews

The Brant Foundation is already out of all 50,000 timed tickets to see its new Jean-Michel Basquiat survey in New York. But fans needn’t despair yet: Further uptown, Nahmad Contemporary is opening another Basquiat survey—also free—focused on the artist’s surprisingly masterful work made with xerox photocopies.

Like the Brant show, and the well-received retrospective that preceded it at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, the Nahmad show, titled “Jean-Michel Basquiat: Xerox,” was curated by Basquiat scholar Dieter Buchhart. “You have a great show uptown and a great show downtown,” Buchhart told artnet News. It was always the intention to organize the complementary shows at the same time, he said, though they are quite different.

© Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York.

The works at Nahmad Contemporary range in date from 1979 through 1987 (the year before Basquiat’s death) and reflect the artist’s playfulness and penchant for experimentation. It opens with Basquiat’s first foray into the xerox medium, when he and his friend Jennifer Stein created a small series of colorful collages by incorporating photocopies of paint splatters, scrawled text, and detritus, including candy wrappers and newspaper clippings, into postcards that they then sold on the street.

Several of these diminutive works are displayed in a double-sided glass case that allow the viewer to see the “© Jean-Michel Basquiat” tag scrawled on the back. A standout of these small earlier works is a 1979 canvas with swaths of blue color, newspaper clippings, and a strip of diagonal black label tape that reads “He Was Crazy,” which is also the title of the work.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, He Was Crazy (1979). Photo by Eileen Kinsella.

In 1983, when collage became a defining element of his practice, Basquiat began using the photocopier extensively as a tool to create paintings. The process of photocopying became so integral to his practice that he eventually invested in his own Xerox machine for his studio.

In the early 1980s he “started joining separate panels because the elevator wasn’t big enough. That gave him the opportunity to play with the panels and exchange them,” Bucchart said.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, King of the Zulus (1984–85). Marseille Museum of Contemporary Art.