Collectable

Royalty, heroism and the streets. Basquiat: when RAGE is creative

The Collectables of the Year Thirty

When asked to describe his art, he responded with customary aplomb: “royalty, heroism, and the streets.” A high school dropout, Basquiat found his true calling hanging out in the streets and immersing himself in the bustling urban milieu of New York. In the early 1980s, when he was twenty, he developed a unique visual vocabulary characterized by repetitive imagery, human heads with open mouths, and a striking intensity. His large canvases vibrate with color, marks, form, and text. This is the case with Sterno (1985), which presents an aggressive and apocalyptic vision of alcohol abuse. The presence of a gin bottle at the center of the canvas is paired with a can of Sterno (a.k.a. canned heat), an alcohol-based fuel created in 1920 and used for heating food, but also notorious for its abuse as an alcohol substitute. Basquiat reinforces the apocalyptic message with the words “Drink Sterno” written on the can and an image in the foreground of a monster with a double mouth, wolf’s teeth, and horns. Dark reddish tones heighten the intensity of this nihilistic evocation of the perils of alcohol abuse.