They wouldn’t have let Jean-Michel into a Tiffany’s if he want­ed to use the bath­room or if he went to buy an engage­ment ring and pulled a wad of cash out of his pock­et. 

– Stephen Tor­ton, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s stu­dio assis­tant

When Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Unti­tled (Skull) sold for $110.5 mil­lion in 2017 to Japan­ese bil­lion­aire Yusaku Mae­sawa, the artist joined the ranks of Da Vin­ci, De Koon­ing, and Picas­so as one of the top sell­ing painters in the world, sur­pass­ing a pre­vi­ous record set in 2013 by his men­tor Andy Warhol’s work. Unti­tled dates from 1982, dur­ing “the young Basquiat’s mer­cu­r­ial ear­ly years,” writes Ben Davis at Art­net, “even before his first gallery show at Anni­na Nosei, when he was still a Caribbean-Amer­i­can kid from Brook­lyn ener­get­i­cal­ly boot­strap­ping him­self into the lime­light of the down­town art scene.” It is this peri­od that most inter­ests col­lec­tors like Mae­sawa.

Basquiat’s tran­si­tion from graf­fi­ti artist to art world dar­ling was dra­mat­ic, cel­e­bra­to­ry, and self-destruc­tive, all char­ac­ter­is­tics of his work. But crit­i­cal prim­i­tivism reduced him to a token — an art world atti­tude saw Basquiats as objects to be stripped of con­text, turned into dec­o­ra­tive badges of authen­tic­i­ty and world­li­ness. “Maezawa’s head paint­ing pos­sess­es a loud, gnash­ing, and con­fi­dent aura,” Shan­non Lee writes at Art­sy. But the artist’s “use of skulls… is deeply root­ed in his iden­ti­ty as a Black artist in Amer­i­ca. They are strong­ly evoca­tive of African masks, which have been so fetishized by the art mar­ket since mod­ernists like Picas­so appro­pri­at­ed them from their native con­texts.”

But head/skull motifs in Basquiat’s work are not only state­ments of dias­poric Black iden­ti­ty — they emerge through his the­mat­ic play of human embod­i­ment, men­tal illness/health, the com­pe­ti­tions of the graf­fi­ti world and the headgames of the art world, which Basquiat both mas­tered and cri­tiqued as a can­ny out­sider. “No sub­ject is more pow­er­ful or more sought after in the oeu­vre of Jean-Michel Basquiat,” notes Christie’s New York, “than the sin­gu­lar skull.” Though maybe not the most repro­duced of Basquiat’s heads, 1982’s Unti­tled — argues the Great Art Explained video above — exem­pli­fies the themes.

At only 22 years old, Basquiat pro­duced “a sin­gle paint­ing” that said “every­thing he want­ed to say about Amer­i­ca, about art and about being black in both worlds.” So sin­gu­lar is Unti­tled that it became its own one-paint­ing show in 2018 when its new own­er sent it on a tour of the world, begin­ning in the artist’s home­town at the Brook­lyn Muse­um. Maesawa’s deci­sion to share the paint­ing presents a con­trast to the way Basquiat has been treat­ed dif­fer­ent­ly by oth­er own­ers of his work like Tiffany & Co., who explain their pur­chase and recent, con­tro­ver­sial com­mer­cial use of his Equals Pi by cit­ing his “affin­i­ty for the company’s state­ment blue col­or,” writes Tirhakah Love at Dai­ly Beast — a col­or they trade­marked ten years after Basquiat’s death.

The pro­pri­etary co-opta­tion of Basquiat’s life and work to sell sym­bols of colo­nial­ism like dia­monds, among oth­er lux­u­ry goods — and the turn­ing of his work into the ulti­mate lux­u­ry good — debas­es his pur­pos­es. Why show Equals Pi “as a prop to an ad?” asked his friend and for­mer room­mate Alex­is Adler. “Loan it out to a muse­um. In a time where there were very few Black artists rep­re­sent­ed in West­ern muse­ums, that was his goal: to get to a muse­um.” Find out in the Great Art Explained video how one of his most famous — and most expen­sive — works encap­su­lates that strug­gle through its vivid col­or and sym­bol­ic visu­al lan­guage.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Take a Close Look at Basquiat’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Art in a New 500-Page, 14-Pound, Large For­mat Book by Taschen

The Sto­ry of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Rise in the 1980s Art World Gets Told in a New Graph­ic Nov­el

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Chaot­ic Bril­liance of Jean-Michel Basquiat: From Home­less Graf­fi­ti Artist to Inter­na­tion­al­ly Renowned Painter

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Botched art restora­tions make good head­lines, but rarely are we asked to con­sid­er if a posthu­mous change to a great mas­ter’s work rep­re­sents an improve­ment. And yet, when images of a restored Girl Read­ing a Let­ter at an Open Win­dow by Jan Ver­meer cir­cu­lat­ed recent­ly, the world had the chance to com­pare the restored orig­i­nal paint­ing, at the left, with an unknown painter’s revi­sion, long thought to be Ver­meer’s work. (Click here to view the paint­ings side by side in a larg­er for­mat.) Sev­er­al peo­ple announced that they pre­ferred the doc­tored paint­ing on the right, first attrib­uted to Ver­meer in 1880 (and pre­vi­ous­ly attrib­uted to Dutch mas­ters Rem­brandt and Hals).

As con­ser­va­tors found at the con­clu­sion of a restora­tion project begun in 2017, it is the paint­ing on the left that Ver­meer intend­ed as his final state­ment on the sub­ject of a girl read­ing a let­ter at an open win­dow. That paint­ing puts the sub­ject in a very dif­fer­ent light. The naked Cupid behind the young woman — in place of an ambigu­ous­ly dour patch of beige — revis­es over a cen­tu­ry of art his­tor­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tion. “With the recov­ery of Cupid in the back­ground, the actu­al inten­tion of the Delft painter becomes rec­og­niz­able,” says Stephan Koja, direc­tor of the Old Mas­ters Pic­ture Gallery.

Art his­to­ri­ans and con­ser­va­tors had long known the oth­er paint­ing was under­neath, hav­ing dis­cov­ered it via X‑ray in 1979. But they assumed it was Ver­meer him­self who made the change. “As it was not uncom­mon for artists to paint over their work,” My Mod­ern Met writes, “schol­ars ini­tial­ly accept­ed that Ver­meer had sim­ply changed his mind and decid­ed to keep the wall bare.” Instead, thanks to the 2017 restora­tion project, “researchers were able to con­clude that the over­paint­ing was com­plet­ed over sev­er­al decades after the can­vas was fin­ished.”

“Ver­meer often incor­po­rat­ed emp­ty back­grounds in his genre paint­ings,” a fea­ture that has become some­thing of a hall­mark thanks to the fame of paint­ings like The Milk­maid. This is one rea­son the Cupid went under­cov­er for so long, despite an unbal­anced com­po­si­tion with­out it. But Ver­meer also incor­po­rat­ed back­grounds filled with art, includ­ing the same Cupid paint­ing, which appears in his less­er known A Young Woman Stand­ing at a Vir­ginal and may have been a paint­ing he him­self owned. “There has been much spec­u­la­tion,” the Nation­al Gallery notes, that this paint­ing (and anoth­er, sim­i­lar­ly titled work) rep­re­sent “fideli­ty” and “a venal, mer­ce­nary approach to love.” What approach might be sug­gest­ed by the new­ly restored Girl Read­ing a Let­ter at an Open Win­dow?

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

See the Com­plete Works of Ver­meer in Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty: Google Makes Them Avail­able on Your Smart­phone

A 10 Bil­lion Pix­el Scan of Vermeer’s Mas­ter­piece Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring: Explore It Online

A Gallery of 1,800 Gigapix­el Images of Clas­sic Paint­ings: See Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Ear­ring, Van Gogh’s Star­ry Night & Oth­er Mas­ter­pieces in Close Detail

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker exists in about 28 full-size bronze casts, each approx­i­mate­ly 73 inch­es high, in muse­ums around the world, as well as sev­er­al dozen cast­ings of small­er size and plas­ter mod­els and stud­ies. The Thinker also exists as one of the most copied and par­o­died art­works in world his­to­ry, per­haps because of its ubiq­ui­ty. “Unfor­tu­nate­ly,” Joseph Phe­lan writes at the Art­cy­clo­pe­dia, “there is a side of Rodin’s work that has become kitsch through cheap repro­duc­tions and com­mer­cial rip-offs.”

In pop­u­lar inter­pre­ta­tions, The Thinker rep­re­sents philo­soph­i­cal abstrac­tion. But Rodin’s fig­ure doesn’t con­tem­plate Plato’s forms or Kant’s cat­e­gories. He dreams of hell, and brings a vision of eter­nal tor­ment into being. He is a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the poet Dante (hence his orig­i­nal name, The Poet) in Rodin’s most ambi­tious mas­ter­work, The Gates of Hell, made on com­mis­sion from the Muse­um of Dec­o­ra­tive Arts in Paris. The sub­ject, “bas-reliefs rep­re­sent­ing The Divine Com­e­dy,” was “sure­ly sug­gest­ed by Rodin him­self, as he was an avid read­er of Dante,” the Asso­ci­a­tion for Pub­lic Art points out.

Divorced from its orig­i­nal con­text — a work begun in 1880 and only com­plet­ed after the artist’s death in 1917 — The Thinker becomes “a uni­ver­sal image,” the Nation­al Gallery of Art writes — one that “reveals in phys­i­cal terms the men­tal effort and even phys­i­cal anguish of cre­ativ­i­ty.” As Rodin him­self put it, “what makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knit­ted brow, his dis­tend­ed nos­trils and com­pressed lips, but with every mus­cle of his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and grip­ping toes.” If we can see his thought­ful pos­ture with fresh eyes, we’ll notice his extreme stress, ten­sion, and pain.

Rodin worked on The Gates of Hell for the final 37 years of his life, and didn’t live to see it cast in full dur­ing his life­time. The mas­sive bronze doors — which also pro­duced such famous Rodin sculp­tures as The Three Shades and The Kiss — con­tain around 200 indi­vid­ual fig­ures and groups of suf­fer­ers from the Infer­no. “For Rodin,” notes the Rodin Muse­um, “the chaot­ic pop­u­la­tion on The Gates of Hell enjoyed only one final free­dom — the abil­i­ty to express their agony with com­plete aban­don … The fig­ures on the doors poignant­ly and heart-rend­ing evoke uni­ver­sal human emo­tions and expe­ri­ences.”

While hell’s denizens writhe and burn below him, The Thinker, perched atop the door, curls in on him­self with the strain of imag­i­na­tion. What­ev­er his orig­i­nal inspi­ra­tion, he came unglued from the Infer­no, his mod­u­lar nature part of the sculptor’s orig­i­nal design. The Thinker is Dante, but also “in a very real sense,” the Met writes, “The Thinker is Rodin. Brutish­ly mus­cled yet engrossed in thought, coiled in ten­sion yet loose in repose.” As a uni­ver­sal sym­bol for con­tem­pla­tion, he is also an image of bring­ing art into being through the sheer force of one’s mind.

Rodin, after all, “nev­er pro­duced a work of plas­ter, bronze, or even mar­ble with his own hands,” says the Great Art Explained video above, pre­fer­ring “an indus­tri­al approach to pro­duc­ing art” that meant a  super­vi­so­ry role over crews of work­ers, rais­ing ques­tions about “authen­tic­i­ty and orig­i­nal­i­ty.” Per­haps Rodin “shows us that an artist should be judged by what’s in his head, not in his hands,” but The Thinker shows us that what’s in the head is also in the hands, the gnarled back, tense sinewy arms, and curled up toes.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Rare Film of Sculp­tor Auguste Rodin Work­ing at His Stu­dio in Paris (1915)

A Free Online Course on Dante’s Divine Com­e­dy from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

Watch 1915 Video of Mon­et, Renoir, Rodin & Degas: The New Motion Pic­ture Cam­era Cap­tures the Inno­v­a­tive Artists

The Sto­ry Behind Rodin’s ‘The Kiss’

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness