Basquiat Rome 1982:
Rare, highly sought-after original catalog/exhibition card to Basquiat's 1982 Rome show at Galleria Mario Diacono, Italy. Opening to four panels, the extensive red engraved text, is among the very first set of catalogue information on the artist. Text in part, discusses the origins of the famous Basquiat 1982 work, The Field Next to the Other Road (Il campo vicino l'altra strada), which was painted by Basquiat in Modena in 1981 then exhibited as a single exhibition piece at Diacomo gallery in 1982. One of the rarest and earliest printed materials related to Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Fine wove card stock with detailed red letterpress.
9.5 x 6 7/8 inches (closed)
Very good to excellent condition with the exception of some minor corner wear.
Text by in Italian by gallerist Mario Diacono.
Unsigned from a scarce edition of unknown. Rare.
Basquiat and 1982:
“For Basquiat, it all converges in 1982,” said the legendary dealer Jeffrey Deitch. “Those of us who were there at the time and saw those paintings just couldn’t believe it. The level of achievement was just astonishing. It was almost a miracle,” he remembered.
In 1982, on the other hand, Basquiat “wasn’t making paintings because he had to give them to Bishofberger for his stipend, or for his show at Mary Boone,” said Deitch. “He was making them because he was compelled to make them, so they are filled with personal passion.”
A series of important exhibitions throughout 1982 also created great momentum for - and, later, the desirability of his work from that year. His first New York solo show with Annina Nosei kicked things off. After came solos at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich, and another New York solo show at Fun Gallery. A February group show at Alexander F. Milliken Gallery presented Basquiat’s now-$110.5 million painting for the first time. That year, he was also included in his first major international institutional exhibition: Documenta, an influential show of contemporary art that takes place in Kassel, Germany, every five years.
This succession of shows in 1982 also served to jumpstart Basquiat’s market; it was the year, Galperin said, “when collectors started to acquire his work en masse.” Nosei was said to be selling his paintings at a breakneck pace—“So brisk, some observers joked, that the paint was barely dry,” Cathleen McGuigan wrote in the 1985 New York Times profile.
Jean-Michel Basquiat was an influential African-American artist who rose to success during the 1980s. Basquiat’s paintings are largely responsible for elevating graffiti artists into the realm of the New York gallery scene. His spray-painted crowns and scribbled words referenced everything from his Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage, to political issues, pop-culture icons, and Biblical verse. The gestural marks and expressive nature of his work not only aligned him with the street art of Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, but also the Neo-Expressionists Julian Schnabel and David Salle. “If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you've got to realize that influence is not influence,” he said of his process. “It's simply someone's idea going through my new mind.” Born on December 22, 1960 in Brooklyn, NY, Basquiat never finished high school but developed an appreciation for art as a youth, from his many visits to the Brooklyn Museum of Art with his mother. His early work consisted of spray painting buildings and trains in downtown New York alongside his friend Al Diaz. The artist’s tag was the now infamous pseudonym SAMO. After quickly rising to fame in the early 1980s, Basquiat was befriended by many celebrities and artists, including Andy Warhol, with whom he made several collaborative works. At only 27, his troubles with fame and drug addiction led to his tragic death from a heroin overdose on August 12, 1988 in New York, NY. The Whitney Museum of American Art held the artist’s first retrospective from October 1992 to February 1993. In 2017, after having set Basquiat’s auction record the previous year with a $57.3 million purchase, the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa surpassed it, buying the artist’s Untitled (1982) at Sotheby's for $110.5 million. This set a new record for the highest price ever paid at auction for an American artist's work. Today, Basquiat's works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among others.
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