Jean-Michel Basquiat also used images of boats in his paintings.
Marshall states that in Basquiat’s triptych, Untitled (History of Black People) (1983), sometimes titled El Gran Espectaculo (The Grand Spectacle), Basquiat has directly copied the elongated and sickle shaped boat of the ancient Egyptians (identified by the word SICKLE) from rock drawing. He suggests that this is a reference to the life and migration of ancient Africans and the tool of manual labour. Untitled (History of Black People) (1983) is comprised of three canvases which have exposed wood supports at the corners and it was executed using acrylic and oil paintstick. The untidy exposed wood supports create a raw, awry, handmade effect.
Marshall, R. (1992) Jean-Michel Basquiat. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art
The painting uses primitive images and techniques. Thomas McEvilley states that Basquiat was a primitivist not a primitive, he chose to imitate the look of “primitive” objects, and as a black man this was a canny reversal of tactics from the white art tradition. He asserts that “for a black man to practice primitivism demonstrated that we had once and for all entered the postcolonial era. By taking on the role of the white borrower, Basquiat collapsed the distance between coloniser and colonised, embodying both at once” (McEvilley 2006:34). McEvilley states that, Basquiat’s work displays a highly self conscious irony and deconstructs European culture through fragmented and jumbled lists that portray any coherence as breaking down.
McEvilley, T. (2006) ‘Jean-Michel Basquiat Here Below’ In Dubuffet, Basquiat: Personal Histories. New York: Pacewildenstein.
Basquiat uses a technique of fragmented deconstruction. In Untitled (The History of Black People) (1983) Basquiat has used broad aggressive strokes and flat areas of colour that both reveal and conceal previous layers of paint and imagery, Marshall (1992) states that this is a painterly technique that Basquiat practiced and refined throughout his career.
The colours used are earthy shades of brown, orange and green with splashes of sunny yellow offset by large areas of death black and stark white, conveying a sense of life and death, darkness, ancient beginnings and earthly endings. There are some words written in capital letters but many letters are scribbled and scratched out; sections have been over painted with further scribbles on top. Borrowed from Cy Twombly this technique was used to activate the viewer’s imagination. In an interview with Emmanuela Belloni, Basquiat stated that “the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them” (Marshall 1992:72).
Untitled (the history of black people)(1983) is covered with references to slavery, African tribalism and ancient Egypt in the form of obscured pictograms. Simon Morley states that various forms of ‘primitive’ picture-writing, such as glyphs, sigils, pictograms, hieroglyphs and ideograms expose the visual roots of communication.
Morley, S. (2003) Writing on the Wall: Word and Image in Modern Art. London: Thames and Hudson.
Bernard Blistene states that covering the walls and paper with incised drawings or pictograms is a reference to the birth of art.
Blistene, B. (1997) Jean-Michel Basquiat: Works on Paper. Paris: Foundation Dina Vierny Musee.
Sieglinde Lemke suggests that “The large ship in the middle panel can be decoded as an ancient Egyptian boat or slave ship. In both cases it denotes routes” (Lemke 2008:135).
Lemke, S. (2008) ‘Diaspora Aesthetics: Exploring the African Diaspora in the Works of Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence and Jean-Michel Basquiat’. In Mercer, K (ed) Exiles, Diasporas and Strangers. London: MIT Press.
Richard Marshall (1992) states that, this large ship is the seagoing ship of the eastern invaders from Wadi Atwani in southern Upper Egypt. Slavery was prevalent in ancient Egyptian civilisation linking it to the more recent slavery in the time of European colonial rulers and linking ancient Africans to African American slaves, with the words ‘Memphis’, ‘Thebes’ and ‘Tennesee’ written underneath the figure of the slave.
