Iconic Artworks: Basquiat’s Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s art combined drawing and painting with a unique stream-of-consciousness street poetry, fusing text and image, gestural abstraction and figuration, and historical information with contemporary critique. His iconic visual poetics were deeply political and direct, criticising colonialism and supporting the class struggle. The extent of Basquiat’s preoccupation with the history of white America’s oppression, racism and inequality towards black people, whilst simultaneously championing the heroes of African American culture, can be seen in his iconic multi-panel painting from 1983, Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta.

Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta

By 1983, the year Basquiat painted Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta, he was already considered an artist at the vanguard of a newly emerging artistic consciousness, one that was to revive the values of painterly expressionism as a new facet of post modern art production. The five-panel painting, which measures 4.5 m in width, combines text, image, colour and form in Basquiat’s signature style, saturating every surface of the canvas. In Undiscovered Genius, the artist moves effortlessly between collective history, personal history, memory and emotion, redefining the genre of History Painting by placing himself in the work as Fig. 23 (Basquiat had turned 23 the year he painted Undiscovered Genius).

Sound and Rhythm

The text in this work elicits a near auditory presence, creating a syncopated rhythm through the cadence of its repetition. “Mississippi,” “Mark Twain” and “Negroes” are each repeated row after row, a sonic echo of insistence and emphasis. The auditory quality of the painting also places the work deeper within the fabric of the African-American narrative, reminiscent of the essential oral histories passed down from generation to generation. Basquiat himself was a musician and DJ as well, frequently finding a way to weave music and his musical inspirations into his paintings.

Basquiat’s Themes and Subject Matter

Undiscovered Genius combines themes and subjects that were of primary concern to Basquiat throughout his short and brilliant life and career, namely the history of racism and inequality in the United States, the experience of being black in modern-day America, and the opposition of the overriding conservative, white narratives of Western painterly conventions. Born to Puerto Rican and Haitian parents and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Basquiat drew from his ancestral background and infused his works with his own version of primitivism. This painting is frequently compared to Picasso’s Guernica, another History Painting in which the artist employed primitivism as an antidote to the conservative Western art world.

One of the words repeated over and over is “Mark Twain,” whose Adventures of Huckleberry Finn follows Huck as he travels along the Mississippi River, and which was written 20 years after the abolishment of slavery as a scathing satire of the attitude towards racism in America. The repetition of “Mississippi” and “Negroes” are considered to be Basquiat’s way of hammering out the deeply traumatic and painful history of slavery and racism in the United States, until the words themselves are emptied of authority and meaning..