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Jean-Michel Basquiat once offered a wonderfully concise explanation of his practice: “I collage my own hand.”
That line could serve as the motto for “Basquiat, the Blue Ribbon Paintings, and the Art of Reproduction,” a new exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum centered on 11 paintings Basquiat made 1984, shown alongside other works by the artist.
The “Blue Ribbon” paintings, reunited here for the first time in more than three decades, are full of repeated images: anatomical drawings, logos, words, and the familiar Basquiat crowned figure. But they were never intended to be seen as straightforward copies of one another; the repetition is never exact. Basquiat shifts things around, paints over them, changes their colors and sometimes prints the same image twice, slightly out of register.
During a virtual walk-through of the exhibition, Alexandra Foradas, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, provided a useful way of thinking about what Basquiat was doing. “He’s thinking like a printmaker, but he’s not making prints,” she said. “He’s incorporating reproductive technologies into all of his practice in various ways.
The exhibition goes back to Xerox works Basquiat made with Jennifer Stein in the late 1970s. The two used photographs, drawings, and scraps of paper to create sheets that they ran through a Xerox machine, then cut into postcards and sold outside museums in New York. They are modest things compared with the huge paintings that would follow, but the basic method is already there. Basquiat makes an image, reproduces it, cuts it up and gives it another life.
In Tuscany (1982), the process had become considerably more elaborate. Basquiat sent an assistant to a copy shop with his drawing of a headless Venus. The copies were cut up and pasted onto small stretched canvases, which were then nailed onto a larger wooden support. The exhibition is full of moments like this, where something familiar about Basquiat suddenly becomes much more literal.
Notary (1983) is an enormous collision of words, diagrams, figures, and references, including anatomical drawings derived from Leonardo da Vinci. Princeton has displayed some of the actual silkscreens used to make the painting nearby. Looking between them turns into a surprisingly entertaining game of “I Spy”: You spot an image on a screen and then find it buried in the painting. Another appears elsewhere, partly covered by whatever image Basquiat put down afterward. It makes the painting easier to understand without making it any less enigmatic.
Nearby, the exhibition traces some of the ideas behind this way of working by drawing connections to the work of Robert Rauschenberg and master printer Robert Blackburn, who worked with Rauschenberg. Basquiat, however, wasn’t simply imitating either artist.
Around the show’s midpoint, it shifts the context to several centuries in the past to Leonardo. On view are copies of a mass-market 1977 book featuring the Renaissance master’s anatomical drawings; Basquiat owned a copy, a fount of inspiration for him. Visitors can effectively view the book from Basquiat’s perspective, hopefully beginning to see how one inspired the other.
I told Foradas it reminded me of a copy of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, featuring the poem being worked over in manuscript, complete with edits and annotations. There is something thrilling about seeing a famous work in progress, before it became entrenched in our collective memory: the crossed-out lines, the alternatives, the decisions. It is about as close as you can get to watching somebody think.
Foradas saw something similar in Basquiat. “You can see him thinking, annotating his own drawings,” she said. “He’s annotating his own practice as he moves through it.”
Foradas talked about how difficult that can be with artists who have become so famous that the legend begins to obscure the work that was done in the studio. Art doesn’t simply spring from an artist’s head “like Athena from Zeus’s skull,” she said. Each painting took time to develop: There was drawing and copying and moving things around. There were things that worked and things that needed another pass.
That is certainly the case with the “Blue Ribbon” paintings, which Basquiat worked on concurrently, laying all 11 canvases out on his studio floor and moving among them. He used the same screens repeatedly but changed their positions, added paint, and worked over the printed images by hand. One canvas begins with an area of thin black paint that Foradas compared to Helen Frankenthaler. Basquiat added gray, orange, red, and blue before finishing with silk-screened images. The surface feels built rather than simply painted.
“You get this sense of iteration and recomposition and editing over the course of the series,” Foradas said. Because Basquiat worked across the paintings at the same time, there isn’t really a first “Blue Ribbon” followed by ten attempts to improve it. They are variations being developed alongside one another. Each painting includes a version of a crowned silhouette. On one, Basquiat made the figure menacing, with glowing red eyes, while another iteration appears almost nervous.
Elsewhere, Basquiat printed the same screen twice, moving it only a few millimeters between impressions. The mistake-looking effect was almost certainly deliberate. By then, she said, Basquiat was too accomplished at silkscreening to accidentally move a screen so minutely.
A group of smaller works makes some of these experiments easier to see. One isolates the intestine image that appears in the “Blue Ribbon” paintings. Another is a loose watercolor that resembles a Color Field painting, rather than the technique typically associated with Basquiat. Foradas agreed with the comparison, noting that Color Field abstraction influences more of the “Blue Ribbon” paintings than one might expect. Once pointed it out, it’s hard to unsee.
All of this makes for a pretty convincing answer to one of the more persistent myths around Basquiat: the idea of the young, instinctive genius pouring images onto canvas almost faster than he could think. Foradas called the tendency to describe him as an “untrained genius” infantilizing. The word “primitive,” she added, still gets used about his work, despite being both “objectionable and incorrect.”
Princeton’s answer is mostly to show the receipts. There are the Xeroxes. There are the silkscreens. There are the books he studied and artists he learned from. There are images he drew, reproduced, rearranged, and returned to years later. There are collaborations with other artists, printers, and studio assistants.
There is, in other words, a lot of work. And hovering around this all is Warhol. “He is sort of the ghost in the corner of the exhibition,” Foradas said. Warhol is impossible to remove from the story of Basquiat and reproduction, but the exhibition resists making him the source of everything.
Rather, its final section looks at Basquiat’s relationship with printmaker and publisher Fred Hoffman through the lens of works like Tuxedo (1983). That work features small screens repeatedly reorganized across a much larger surface. (A version of Tuxedo, from an edition of 10, was on view in early 2024 at Gagosian’s LA outpost for “Made on Market Street,” a show dedicated to the work Basquiat made in Los Angeles in the early ’80s.)
While Warhol typically dominates in discussions of Basquiat’s connections to other artists, he just one of many—along Blackburn, Rauschenberg, Leonardo, and more. I went into the walk-through expecting a show about a group of Basquiat paintings I knew reasonably well. At first, “I collage my own hand” seems like a clever line, whipped up by a publicist. By the end of the show, it sounds more like a set of instructions.