Jean-Michel Basquiat Leonardo Series Prints For Sale

The Leonardo series brought Basquiat face to face with one of art history's most studied figures. Made in 1983 through New City Editions in Venice, California, the five screenprints came about through gallerist and publisher Fred Hoffman, who had spent time in Basquiat's studio watching him work through the night and, as a recent art history PhD, brought over some of his own books on Leonardo da Vinci. Basquiat became interested in producing a print based on da Vinci's work, and the two agreed on an unconventional process: Basquiat would draw directly onto clear acetates, which would then be photographed and transferred to silkscreen. Hoffman later found the acetates scattered across the studio floor, mixed in with drawing paper, oilsticks, cigarette butts and cassette tapes, and offered to clean them up before printing. Basquiat insisted they stay exactly as they were, and the accidental marks and studio debris became part of the finished images, giving the prints what Hoffman described as a patina, "as though they were as old as the sources they referenced."

Leonardo wasn't a passing reference for Basquiat either. According to Hoffman, Basquiat found in Leonardo's anatomical sketches "a viable means of educating himself about human form and function," and recognised in the Renaissance master "a kindred spirit able to transform scientific truth into artistic vision." The prints themselves littered Leonardo-esque studies of dismembered body parts and Greco-Roman sculpture across the sheet alongside Basquiat's own fragmented text, printed on Japanese rice paper chosen specifically to echo the age and material of the drawings that inspired it. The five prints now sit in the permanent collections of both MoMA and MOCA Los Angeles, a rare distinction for an editioned Basquiat work.

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