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Provenance: Nosei Gallery, New York
Galerie Delta, Rotterdam
Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1986
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Notes: PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE DUTCH COLLECTION
On occasion, Christie's has a direct financial interest in lots consigned for sale which may include guaranteeing a minimum price or making an advance to the consignor that is secured solely by consigned property. This is such a lot. This indicates both in cases where Christie's holds the financial interest on its own, and in cases where Christie's has financed all or a part of such interest through a third party. Such third parties generally benefit financially if a guaranteed lot is sold successfully and may incur a loss if the sale is not successful.
When asked what the subject matter of his paintings was, Jean-Michel Basquiat was unequivocal: "Royalty, heroes and the streets" (J.-M. Basquiat, quoted in H. Geldzahler, "Art: from subways to Soho: Jean Michel Basquiat," pp. 18-26, Jean Michel Basquiat: Gemelde und Arbeiten auf Papier , exh.cat., Vienna, 1999, p. 23). Painted in 1982, the year that Basquiat claimed he painted his "best paintings ever," Sugar Ray Robinson depicts one of the artist's heroes, a member of the pantheon of black characters that Basquiat celebrated in paintings filled with passion, with energy, with a rawness that mingles his graffiti origins with a directness that echoes children's art. Indeed, Basquiat himself referred several times to the fact that he admired the pictures of children, often more than he admired those of his contemporaries.
In Sugar Ray Robinson , the protagonist is shown as a hulking figure, hunched in his rigidity. He is in his shorts and gloves, as though ready for another bout. The world champion boxer is shown in his element as a sporting god. The features have been rendered with a frantic sense of movement that borders on the manic. As Basquiat himself said, his pictures are "about 80 anger" (J.-M. Basquiat, quoted Ibid. , p. 26). This is true in terms both of its scrawled execution and its content. The lone, defiant sports-warrior is an indictment, a celebration, a commiseration all rolled into one. Basquiat was always painfully aware of his status as a black artist, and as a black American. And he was all the more aware of the discrimination in the world around him, an awareness that increased during his time as a graffiti artist. He became exposed to life in the raw, and it was this rawness, combining with his erudition, his cultured and slightly alternative childhood and education, that resulted in his unique voice, in his idiosyncratic perspective on issues of race and racism. "I'm interested in painting the black person," Basquiat explained. "He's the protagonist in most of my paintings." When asked why, he declared: "I realized I never saw any paintings with black people in them" (J.-M. Basquiat, quoted in R. Knapo, The Basquiat File , at http://www.spikemagazine.com/0397basq.php). In Sugar Ray Robinson , Basquiat is helping to correct that balance. This man is a hero, a street-saint. Basquiat rehabilitates a great African American within the hallowed halls and the traditionally anglocentric Western artistic context of the gallery, of the painting. At the same time, there is an anxiety clearly present in Sugar Ray Robinson . The picture is as much about the adversity that the boxer faced as it is about his achievements and it is as much about his downfall too.
The figures such as Joe Louis, Charlie Parker and Sugar Ray Robinson who featured in paintings such as this one were both heroes and martyrs. It was largely for their martyr-status that Basquiat painted them, as he himself sympathized, empathized and believed that he himself was a victim. In this sense, then, Sugar Ray Robinson is a self-portrait, a strange fetish-like self-representation in which the artist both celebrates his pioneering actions as a black artist and exorcises or perhaps merely acknowledges the pitfalls and dangers of his position. It is telling that, the same year that Sugar Ray Robinson was painted, Basquiat exhibited another work showing the same boxer at the FUN Gallery in New York. This show had a gritty character, and this clearly appealed to the artist, as several of the pictures, not least that alternative image of Sugar Ray, were marked "not for sale" and were retained in Basquiat's private collection, an intimation of the special status that the boxer had within his world.
For Basquiat, Sugar Ray Robinson was one of the touchstones, one of the originals, a trailblazer forcing people to set aside prejudice. Robinson was a natural choice for Basquiat's canon of black heroes, not least because he was so flawed, a feature of many of these figures and something that would tragically be reflected in the arc of the artist's own life. Robinson was the world welterweight champion, and then moved into another division, becoming the world middleweight champion. In this category, he became the first boxer to win a divisional world championship five times. It has often been stated that Robinson was the greatest boxer of all time, pound for pound-- Muhammad Ali may have famously claimed that he was the "greatest," but qualified the statement by saying that he meant this only in terms of his own category, recognising Sugar Ray as the greatest overall.
Sugar Ray Robinson had gained his name, literally, because of his "sweet as sugar" boxing style. His success was a story of struggles against adversity. This was not only because boxing was still a highly segregated sport when he entered the scene, but also because he was too young to compete officially at the beginning of his career. For this reason, the boxer originally born Walker Smith, Jr., borrowed a card from his friend Ray Robinson, and history was written in a slightly different way -- he retained his adopted moniker for the rest of his life. There is a sense of the martyr, of the fanatic, to the progress of this sporting legend who continued in his downfall. Robinson was famous for living the big life, often to the detriment of his finances. Rumored to own a thousand suits, to travel, even internationally, with a cohort of beautiful women, to have blown millions of dollars worth of earnings in an era when people survived on almost nothing, Robinson's fall was arguably as epic as his rise, and resulted in a final stage during which he spent a great deal of his time on the stage, dancing as a professional. Robinson believed that dance helped his boxing, but it also helped, one suspects, to assuage his debtors. To Basquiat, this may have seemed like a strange humiliation at the hands of the establishment, and would doubtless have increased his fascination with the boxer. It doubtless served to illustrate the artist's own anxieties about his success, about his status as a black artist within the white world of the New York art scene, and -- tragically, all too accurately -- about his own potential to fall.
24651516: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (Sugar Ray Robinson) , 1982. c 2005 The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat ADAGP, Paris Artists Rights Society, New York.
24651462: Jean-Michel Basquiat, photo shoot for "Collaborations" poster, 1985. Photographs by Michael Halsband. c 2007 The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat ADAGP, Paris Artists Rights Society, New York.
25249262: Andy Warhol with Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1980s. Photo by Wolfgang Wesener.
24650014: Sugar Ray Robinson, January 30, 1947. c Bettmann CORBIS.
24650571: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (detail) , 1982. c 2007 The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
24650588: Jean-Michel Basquiat, St. Joe Louis surrounded by Snakes , 1982. c 2007 The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
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