Basquiat’s Most Iconic Artwork Hides A Deeper Story – Here’s What You Might Have Missed

All eyes are on the world of Basquiat this month at the Service95 Book Club – Dua’s Monthly Read For June is, after all, Widow Basquiat by Jennifer Clement. This captivating memoir delves into the life of Suzanne Mallouk, her relationship with Jean-Michel Basquiat and the almost mythically captivating creative scene of 1980s New York, in which they lived (discover more details in Dua’s interview with the author here).

While the book looks at Basquiat through the eyes of those around him, here, acclaimed art expert and critic Will Gompertz offers an alternative lens: taking us into the mind of the artist through what might be considered his most notable work.

Notary (1983) is considered by many critics to be a masterpiece. In this extract from his book, See What You Are Missing (Viking, 2023), Will decodes some of the words and symbols that occur within the paintings, and the stylistic traits that can be seen throughout the artist’s work...

An Extract From See What You Are Missing by Will Gompertz

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s early 1980s paintings are very good. Notary (1983) is a masterpiece. Nobody had made a work like it before and nobody has since. It’s a sprawling, scrawling mass of ideas, emotions, opinions, references, conversations, observations, portraiture, reportage, wordplay, over-painting, under-painting, redaction, reduction, re-drawing and constant reassessment. It looks like an incoherent mess but is actually a virtuosic composition without compare, a symphony for a city: a reflection on the complexities of contemporary urban life and our hyper- stimulated minds.

Art tends to be about a process of paring down to get see what you’re missing to the essence of a subject. Fine. But such a narrow focus is not how we actually see and experience the world. We are rarely, if ever, in a position when we can concentrate solely on one thing and one thing only. Even when locked in a cell with nothing to observe beyond its four plain walls, our minds will wander: thoughts will pop into our head, sounds and smells will trigger associated images. We are constantly juggling multiple inputs. Everything we ‘see’ is contextualized by an ever-changing visual collage of associated and disassociated thoughts, conscious and unconscious. There’s mayhem going on up there in our heads, which is the essence of what Basquiat is revealing in Notary.

Jean-Michel was not an artist who enjoyed talking about his work. ‘It’s like asking Miles [Davis] how does your horn sound?’ he said in Tamra Davis’s Basquiat documentary Radiant Child. He did, though, provide some clues to Notary, a painting loaded with a cryptic concoction of references, including classical antiquity, Disney cartoons, racism, Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical studies, the slave trade, Marxist theory, the Bible, modern art, planetology, chemistry, graffiti, African tribal symbols, hip-hop and Egyptian hieroglyphics.

It starts in the top left-hand corner with the planet Pluto, which Basquiat based on Galileo’s first drawing of the moon. He attached the © sign (a symbol he had repeatedly used from his SAMO© days) to the word PLUTO, apparently in case Disney tried to claim it owned the rights to the name. He crossed out the word PLUTO below because it wasn’t very good. The word SALT in the bottom left-hand corner, which is repeated on the opposite side, is a reference to the mineral’s use as a valuable currency in ancient Rome.

The transactional theme is continued with the inclusion of the word NOTARY, a legal professional who authenticates documents and commercial contracts. The jagged shape below the word NOTARY, which is not unlike the crown Basquiat often used in his paintings, is a broken notary’s seal. The contract has been read. The painting’s mercantile message is made explicit with the writing at the bottom of the picture, below the two central figures, which reads: THIS NOTE FOR ALL DEBTS PUBLIC + PRIVATE. These are the words (including ‘legal tender’) that are printed on every dollar bill. Basquiat, who is under pressure to produce new work for expectant clients, is turning his art into money, using his painting as the Romans used salt, as a currency. The composition mimics that of a dollar bill, particularly the two panels to the left, where the middle lifebelt-shaped circle is indented, and the ‘evil eye’, as the artist called it, is peering out just as it does from the top of the pyramid on the reverse side of a dollar bill. But Basquiat has included two heads, not one, the first of which is a helmet (CASCO is Puerto Rican Spanish for helmet). The second figure is almost certainly a self-portrait, which was probably informed by the Aztec era Mask of Tezcatlipoca, the god of the night sky.

The more you look, the more you see. Blood-sucking bugs are clearly on the artist’s mind: PARASITES, FLEAS and LEECHES (numbered 46 and 47 because, Basquiat said, the list of leeches is so long). Is he referring to those voracious art collectors, who he felt were sucking him dry and leaving him creatively DEHYDRATED? What about the words in the middle? They are hard to make out at first (Basquiat thought semi-obliteration made you look harder), but read: ROACHESS DEHYDRATED AS A RESULT OF BORIC ACID. Is he celebrating the success he’s had with boric acid (a popular powder product that kills cockroaches through dehydration) in getting rid of an infestation in his studio? Or is he talking about the art world, or drugs, or making a link back to salt? And then there’s the panel on the right with white lettering coming out of a black background, which says: INTRODUCTION (painted out) TO PLUTO, and above it, ACADEMIC (mostly painted over) STUDY OF THE MALE TORSO.

The only male torso depicted belongs to the black figure, which, supposing it is a self-portrait, makes sense of the scoring out of the word ACADEMIC, as Basquiat had no formal training as an artist but had intensely studied Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings. The body was a subject he had been interested in since childhood after a car knocked him over when he was seven or eight, which led to a lengthy stay in hospital and the removal of his spleen. His mother gave him a copy of Gray’s Anatomy (possibly the inspiration for the name of his band) as a source of ideas for drawings.

The Bible and slavery are alluded to in the words SICKLES and MATTOCKS, which appear in the bottom half of Notary’s right-hand panel. They are a cross-reference to the opening minutes of the movie Downtown ’81 (shot 1980, released 2000), in which Basquiat stars. As he walks through Lower Manhattan wearing his trademark oversized overcoat, a voiceover introduces the character he is playing, which is basically himself:

JEAN [voiceover]: Are not princes kings? Ancient and honourable neither sword nor spear dispersed into the four corners of the earth. For the sickles, for the mattocks, for the forks, for the axes. And the earth was formed as void. Darkness upon the face of the deepest spirit moved across the water and there was light. It was good. 

Notary is both personal and universal. It is a snapshot of the artist’s mind and soul, and an account of how we all think and perceive. Whatever it is we think we are looking at, we are seeing it through a messy montage of half-thoughts, senses and peripheral images. Nothing is ever seen in total isolation.

Widow Basquiat is Dua’s Monthly Read For June – discover the author’s full video interview with Dua here, or listen to it with the Service95 Book Club podcast here.

Extracted from See What You’re Missing by Will Gompertz, published by Viking, £10.99 Copyright © Will Gompertz 2023