Basquiat’s Untitled (Pablo Picasso), from 1984: a bold tribute from one 20th-century titan to another

Jean-Michel Basquiat acknowledged Picasso as one of his most important influences. He recalled Guernica (1937), which was on display at MoMA in New York until 1981, as having been his favourite artwork as a child. By 1985, he had a small Picasso oil painting in his own collection.

Perhaps the first bona fide artist-celebrity of the modern era —charismatic, regal and frequently photographed — Picasso was a model in his stardom as well as in his prodigious artistic output.

‘Since I was 17, I thought I might be a star,’ Basquiat once said. ‘I’d think about all my heroes, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix… I had a romantic feeling of how people had become famous.’ His works often memorialised these Black heroes, including boxers, baseball players, and musicians. He blurred their identities with his own.

The field of modern painting, however, provided few Black precedents. Basquiat wanted to make his mark in an overwhelmingly white arena. Painted and drawn in oil, acrylic and oilstick on a square metal panel, Untitled (Pablo Picasso) (1984) is a bold tribute from one 20th-century titan to another, offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 28 June 2023.

Basquiat’s young-old Picasso appears to have been based on two different visual sources, probably found in one of his books about the artist. The face derives from a portrait of Picasso taken in 1896 (above), when he was 15 years old. The Breton shirt became part of Picasso’s image much later, and was immortalised in a famous photoshoot by Robert Doisneau in 1952.

Bringing aspects of these two eras into a single persona, Basquiat develops the theme of a work on paper he made in the same year, titled Young Picasso. There, the artist’s youthful and older faces are drawn side by side. The watchful ‘YOUNG PICASSO’ is finely featured in ochre, while the red visage of ‘OLD PICASSO’ has been scribbled out.

In Untitled (Pablo Picasso), the young face is shaded with even greater care, as if Basquiat is trying out one of Picasso’s more naturalistic styles for himself. But it is also heavier than in the drawing. His features are overlaid by dark lines, squaring off the jaw and opening the mouth into a slight grimace. With the cloud of fame hovering over him, this hybrid Picasso seems older than his years, and troubled by the premonition of his greatness.

Thickets of blue highlight his hair and burst in a storm cloud above his head, as if depicting the buzz of his mind. The word ‘FAMOUS’ can be glimpsed amid the blue. ‘PABLO PICASSO’ is written seven times, like an incantation, and the legend ‘PICASSO AT 15 YEARS / PICASSO AS A FIFTEEN YEAR OLD’ can be seen, partly obscured, on his chest. Basquiat conflates timelines, depicting a youthful Picasso in the iconic Breton-striped guise of his older self.

Basquiat’s attitude towards Picasso was not one of straightforward hero worship. He was acutely aware that the Spanish painter’s ‘primitivist’ appropriations of African masks and sculpture — epitomised in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) — had changed the language of 20th-century painting. This story was one that had systematically excluded Black artists.

In 1983, the curator Diego Cortez described Basquiat as the ‘Black Picasso’. Asked later if he liked the comparison, Basquiat replied: ‘Not so much. It’s flattering, but I think it is also demeaning.’

The self-conscious and sophisticated primitivism that Basquiat adopted — toying with the premise that a Black artist should in fact be ‘primitive’ — subverted the expectations of the largely white art world in 1980s New York. His use of fragmented, juxtaposed African artistic motifs was necessarily different from Picasso’s. Loaded with pain, provocation and irony, Basquiat’s works explored his own complex identity as a Black man in America, as well as the wider historical position of racially marginalised people.

Artists have long confronted, learnt from and departed from the masters of the past as a way of finding their own voice. But it is a sense of irreconcilable difference, rather than affinity, that makes this portrait so powerful. If Basquiat sees himself in the young Picasso, the overt whiteness of the earlier artist’s skin denies him the ease of identification. He knew that his path to glory would be compromised in ways that Picasso never had to contend with.

In Untitled (Pablo Picasso), Basquiat’s inimitable line, energetic colours, and fierce, quickfire intelligence are their own testament to greatness. He leaves a mark that could belong to no other artist.