Jean-Michel Basquiat (born 1960 in Brooklyn, New York, died 1988 in New York from an overdose of heroine) emerged from the New York punk and graffiti scene in the late 1970s. He rose to the public’s attention with his graffities which, together with his companion Al Diaz, he signed anonymously under the pseudonym SAMO. The Times Square Show, an event held at the beginning of the 1980s which included spray paintings and brushworks by “SAMO” introduced Basquiat to the public.

An article about Basquiat in the ArtForum magazine entitled “The Radiant Child” (1981) was the beginning of a career in the fine arts scene and away from graffiti. Here the child of Haitian and Puerto Rican parents met established and distinguished artists like Andy Warhol, with whom he was to collaborate, or Julian Schnabel. Basquiat himself became a shooting star of the vivid and varied 1980s art scene. His spontaneous, colorful, and expressive paintings are special due to their combination of the artist’s own primitive figurative language, which included archaic figures, faces and calligraphic elements, primarily clear colors, written words and statements meant to be deciphered by the beholder and his imaginative perception.

Tobacco Versus Red Chief in The UBS Art Collection is one of the early paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat and includes typical elements of his formal language. It shows an American Indian chief with his arm raised in the traditional Indian gesture of greeting that we have become familiar with through mass media. He is holding three cigars in his hand which he is staring at. It appears that he has got these in exchange for his land whilst being imprisoned by barbed wire drawn around the picture. In the background are two tents and one with simple outlines in the foreground. This one is connected to the handwritten letters “hotel”. The painting appears nice and pleasant with its primitive manner of depicting the “Red Chief” and at the same time it is of obviously a critical comment on American history and the American’s treatment of the Indians and other minorities.

Reference: Richard Marschall, Jean-Michel Basquiat, exh.cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, 1992.