Lot #2509: JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT - To Repel Ghosts - Color offset lithograph

 

Artist: Jean-Michel Basquiat (American, 1960-1988).
Title: "To Repel Ghosts [poster]".
Medium: Color offset lithograph.
Date: Composed 1986.
Dimensions: Overall size: 33 1/8 x 24 1/4 in. (841 x 616 mm).
Lot Note(s): Signed in black marker, upper center. Edition unknown, probably small. Light cream wove paper. The full sheet. Fine impression. Fine condition. Comment(s): A rare poster, very rare when signed. No non-internet auction sales located. We did find an example offered with pre-sale estimates of $5,000/7,000 at artnet auctions, December 20, 2012, apparently going unsold. Issued for the highly important exhibition entitled "Jean-Michel Basquiat" at Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover, November 28, 1986 to January 25, 1987. Basquiat died on August 12, 1988. His "To Repel Ghosts" series takes its title "after the Swiss diplomat Claudio Caratsch, who worked for many years in Africa, explained to Basquiat that often African art and artifacts served the everyday functions of repelling ghosts. In 1986’s acrylic on wood, resembling a boarded up window or storefront, Basquiat paints the phrase across the middle panel of wood and underneath places a “TM” (for "trademarked"). Like most hip-hop artists, Basquiat was acutely aware of branding’s value; the utilitarian function of everyday art and artifact (“to repel ghosts”) becomes an advertising slogan in a proprietary field that uses, abuses, and ultimately disabuses artists of the romance of art as above and beyond market forces. But oil works using the same slogan and from the same year show Basquiat effacing the phrase, placing black paint over the ghosts, in effect repelling (etymologically, to push back) the repelling of ghosts, as if trying to rescue the idea’s intention from profane sloganeering." (courtesy Alessandro Porco). Image copyright © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. [28407-6-400]