Emily
Macdonald-Korth, an art conservator, thought she was going in for a
regular forensic job last month when a client asked her to verify that the
Jean-Michel Basquiat painting he owned was in fact done in 1981, as he’d been
told.
She planned
to conduct pigment and elemental analyses, take technical photographs, and look
at the picture under UV and infrared lights. It was all checking out normally
until she brought out her handheld UV flashlight, usually used to spot varnish
or other signs that a painting has undergone repair, and turned off the
overhead lights.
That’s when
she saw them: drawings that Basquiat had made in invisible ink.
“I start
looking at this thing and I see these arrows,” Macdonald-Korth told artnet
News. She flipped the lights back on to make sure she wasn’t imagining things
and the arrows disappeared. She flipped the lights off again and there they
were: two arrows drawn in what looked like black-light crayon, virtually
identical to other arrows drawn visibly on the canvas with red and black oil
sticks. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said. “He basically did a
totally secret part of this painting.”
In fact,
this isn’t the first time Basquiat has been known to use fluorescent UV
materials. In 2012, Sotheby’s London discovered that his painting Orange Sports
Figure from 1982—done just months after the one Macdonald-Korth
analyzed—contained an invisible-ink signature of the artist’s name in the
bottom right corner. But he has never been known to include UV-specific imagery
in his work.
It’s not
clear whether Basquiat intended the invisible drawings to serve as an
underlying guide for the painting, or if he considered them an element of the
completed work. But Macdonald-Korth thinks they fit into his larger process of
painting over an image and leaving it partially visible, “so there’s a history
there, having something secret there,” she said. “He must have been playing
with a UV flashlight and thought, ‘this is cool.’ It really relates to his use
of erasure.”
Macdonald-Korth
believes that more UV drawings will appear on other canvases if owners take the
time to look.
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