[Scott Real World Brooklyn Nude
Virginie Fayad
Basquiat was a drawer; he drew to release from his mind his dynamic texts, shapes and symbols in a deluge of artistic spontaneity onto paper. His creative imagination led him to frequently reuse and re-imagine graphic symbols, turning them into striking visual combinations, scattered with poetic snippets, resulting in an elegant, artistic vocabulary that was all his own. For Basquiat, the draftsmanship of drawing was never a means of studying or preparation but an artistic practice in its own right.
This May in New York, Phillips proudly presents six works on paper by Jean-Michel Basquiat from the Collection of Scott D.F. Spiegel, an esteemed Los Angeles art collector whose cutting-edge acquisitions of 1980s artwork and commitment to emerging art is demonstrated by the multitude of works purchased for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles through the Scott D. F. Spiegel Endowment Fund. These six works represent the best of Basquiat's works on paper which stand within the artist's practice as his most pure of creations.
Scott Spiegel began collecting at the age of 17 when, as a high school student, he found his way to the most prominent galleries in New York in pursuit of undiscovered gems by Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. A few years later while attending Georgetown University in Washington D.C., where he studied art history, Scott began developing relationships with young New York artists such as Peter Reginato, Troy Brauntuch, David Salle and Robert Longo.
After graduating from Georgetown Law School in 1979, Scott decided to move to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the entertainment field. He was the youngest amidst a group of Hollywood executives passionately dedicated to "the art of the new" in the early 1980s. He came to the entertainment industry to work for Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin; and after this sojourn became a leading TV executive at ABC Television. Scott quickly bonded with other Hollywood collectors passionate about contemporary art, including Douglas S. Cramer, Dan Melnick, Barry Lowen, Jake Bloom, Alan Hergott and Bud Yorkin. Scott always credited Barry Lowen as the collector who truly shaped his vision:
Scott learned from Barry Lowen to trust his intuition when confronting the art of the new. This served him well, as Scott was able to seek out and identify many of the artists who are now the acclaimed masters of their generation. I witnessed Scott's instincts as a collector many times, through our various studio visits including our first visit to the studio of Mike Kelley in 1982 where Scott immediately bonded with Mike and keenly selected several pieces to acquire. That day Scott became one of Mike's earliest collectors. Not only did Scott and I share our belief in the vision of this newly emerging talent, but from that day forward, and for the next ten years, we religiously shared our passion for a new spirit in art.
When Scott began collecting the art of the '80s, the work presented at two leading art galleries helped to shape his vision. From the outset of the opening of the Larry Gagosian Gallery on Almont Dr. in West Hollywood in 1981, Scott developed a close association with Larry Gagosian. Scott closely followed the gallery's early program, including exhibitions by Salle, Basquiat and Cindy Sherman. One of Scott's early acquisitions was Basquiat's monumental painting Six Crimee, 1982. This work, one of the defining pieces in Basquiat's oeuvre, is now in the collection of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles: The Scott D. F. Spiegel Collection.
Not only did Scott collect for himself, he equally provided critical advice and encouragement to many other Hollywood collectors, including Barry Lowen and Douglas S. Cramer, both of whom became aware of Basquiat through their junior colleague. Barry Lowen later donated a major Basquiat painting to The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and Douglas S. Cramer to The Whitney Museum of American Art.
Scott also closely aligned himself with members of "The Pictures Generation," especially those artists exhibiting at Metro Pictures in New York. Scott was one of the early supporters of Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo and Laurie Simmons. He became especially close with Robert Longo, not only collecting his work, but also bringing Robert to the attention of other Hollywood collectors; and even facilitating Robert's introduction to Hollywood as a film director. A record of their friendship is visually memorialized in Robert Longo's three-part work entitled Scott.
A testament to both Scott's vision as a collector as well as his defining role in the art of the early 1980s is his formation of the The Scott D.F. Spiegel Collection at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Including works by Basquiat, Salle, Longo, Susan Rothenberg, Mark Innerst and many others, Scott's donation to MOCA, alongside those of Barry Lowen, Phil and Bea Gersh, Bob Half and others, helped to create one of the most definitive collections of 1980s art. Scott's commitment to MOCA also took on another important dimension; he had long expressed his desire to create a permanent fund that would enable the museum to regularly acquire new works by young and emerging artists for its collection. Scott's bequest to initiate The Scott D. F. Spiegel Purchase Endowment for MOCA made this dream a reality. As Richard Koshalek, the former Director of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles noted, "Scott's goals for his collection and endowment closely matched MOCA's own mission to encourage and cultivate the making of art, the exchange of ideas and the enhancement of artistic and cultural experience for a broad public."
This work presents a full-length, armless black male depicted in the nude. Not only does the work reveal the figure's external physiognomy, it equally portrays internal organs and musculature. Unique in the oeuvre from this period, both arms are severed at the shoulder sockets. This disembodiment is suggested by "energy" lines extending away from the figure's right shoulder as well as by a symbolic lightning bolt directly below. Basquiat reinforced this representation of physical loss in the depiction of a severed foot and ankle with spikes or nails driven through the toes and ankle. The rendering of the severed foot in Untitled is depicted again in King Brand, one of the works on paper from The Daros Suite.
Acque Pericolose was an important precedent for Untitled. "In what may be interpreted as the artist's first major self-portrait, the artist has depicted himself as vulnerable, yet possessed with pride and authority...a sense of being at peace with himself even though he is surrounded by death and upheaval" (Fred Hoffman, "The Defining Years, Notes on Five Key Works." Basquiat, The Brooklyn Museum, 2005). In Untitled, Basquiat elaborates on these same themes of vulnerability and transcendence, further using his picture making as a means of both self-representation and the expression of a larger "world view."
Central to Basquiat's practice was the representation within the same work of seemingly disparate and conflicting aspects of human experience. Whether it was the idea of reversing black into white or white into black, the scales of justice, or the theme of "God and Law," the artist was continually concerned with the representation of a duality, and the integration and reconciliation of seemingly opposing forces. In Untitled Basquiat's duality is the representation of an armless figure alongside a tall classical column, on top of which he has placed an eagle with open wings. Emphasizing the importance of this bird, he has included three additional birds all represented with spread open wings. These images link this work on paper to the monumental painting Untitled (LA Painting) executed a few months earlier in 1982. Basquiat's birds symbolize perspicacity, courage, freedom and immortality. They are his messengers from the highest Gods. In classical Roman culture the image or object of an open-winged bird was a symbol of power and strength.
This conclusion is reinforced by the inclusion of a resting four-legged creature above which Basquiat scrawled the word "Androcolis," in reference to the tale Androcles and the Lion written by the Greek storyteller, Aesop, in which Androcles, a slave was saved by the requiting mercy of a lion which can be compactly moralized into the statement: "Gratitude is the sign of noble souls." Basquiat refers to the story of Androcoles and the Lion as an additional level of context to his works' primary theme of transcendence of physical and psychological adversity. Neither the word "Androcolis" nor a crouching lion are found in any other works by the artist.
As noted, Basquiat had previously turned to a similar pictorial strategy of juxtaposing figure and animal in the representation of a half alive, half skeleton cow alongside a reverential standing black male figure in Acque Pericolose. In Untitled, Basquiat relegates his lion to a "supporting" role. Much like the multi-positioned open-winged birds symbolizing liberation and transcendence, Basquiat's lion functions symbolically and does not imply a narrative interaction with his standing figure. In other words, Basquiat's figure is not Androcoles and the artist is not representing the popular tale. Having initiated his work by presenting an armless figure and accompanying "victory column," the young Basquiat was drawn to the popular tale of the prisoner and lion as his means of enhancing the subject matter of his work. In this popular tale, the ever perceptive, always discovering young artist found a message compatible with his own personal vision as a young black man attempting to overcome adversity and assert his identity.
Scott Speigel acquired Untitled (Three Heads) at the same time as the monumental Six Crimee from the artist's first exhibition at the Larry Gagosian Gallery (April 8-May 8, 1982). The ambitious new collector met Basquiat during the young painter's initial visit to Los Angeles for his opening at the Larry Gagosian Gallery, accompanied by members of his "crew" Ramelzee and Toxic. Their visit to Los Angeles is memorialized in the wonderful painting Hollywood Africans now at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Scott continued to stay in touch with Jean-Michel Basquiat, visiting him in his New York studio and regularly seeing him in Los Angeles later that same year, at which time Basquiat both worked and resided in the ground floor of Larry Gagosian's townhouse in Venice. Six Crimee is the depiction of six black heads, each highly individualized and expressive, each topped by a nimbus, each hovering above abstract gestural paint strokes, a row of numbers, graffiti-like scrawls, and some recognizable imagery resembling game boards. The figures and surrounding space are all bathed in, even caught up in a rich, aqua-marine atmosphere.
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