Anthony Haden-Guest’s marvellous Vanity Fair article on Jean-Michel Basquiat tells of the prodigious artist’s first visit to Africa, specifically Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
Haden-Guest quotes Basquiat’s girlfriend Jennifer Goode: “We had a wonderful time. Artists came and talked to him. I remember he was disappointed that they were doing copies of Western art. He thought it would be more like his work, but the only things that were anything like his were on the outside of houses. Or just signs.”
“Ironically, Basquiat, who had come to primitive art via Picasso, felt that contemporary African artists needed liberation from the School of Paris,” writes Haden-Guest.
Basquiat included cave art among his influences. I have layered his 1984 self-portrait into rock art images made by unrecorded South African artists.
Rock-paintings in South Africa. George
Stow and Dorothea Bleek. 1930.
Burning Out by Anthony Haden-Guest, Vanity Fair. November, 1988.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1988/11/jean-michel-basquiat
https://www.jean-michel-basquiat.org/self-portrait/
#postmodern rock art