Television and Cruelty to Animals - Jean-Michel Basquiat

A 1983 Neo-Expressionist work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, featuring a dense arrangement of text, symbols, and gestural figures.

Television and Cruelty to Animals (1983) is a representative example of Jean-Michel Basquiat's approach to painting. The work functions as a dense visual field, combining text, symbols, and figurative elements that reflect the artist's engagement with urban culture and media. Basquiat employs a raw, immediate application of paint and oilstick, creating a surface that mimics the aesthetic of graffiti and street signage.

The composition is populated by recurring motifs: a stylised bat figure, an eight-ball, and a moose head. These elements are interspersed with handwritten phrases and numbers, such as 'Masonic Lodge No. 43' and 'Popeye versus the Nazis'. The inclusion of crossed-out text is a consistent feature in Basquiat's practice, which he noted was a method to draw attention to the words themselves. The palette is limited, relying on primary colours against a neutral ground, which allows the aggressive, gestural lines to dominate the visual experience.

Basquiat's work often synthesises disparate cultural references, from popular cartoons to historical and political symbols. In this piece, the juxtaposition of these icons creates a fragmented narrative. The viewer is presented with a series of signs that resist a singular interpretation. The work reflects the artist's interest in the power of language and the way information is consumed and discarded in contemporary society. By placing these symbols in a non-hierarchical arrangement, Basquiat forces a confrontation between the viewer and the chaotic nature of the information age. The physical presence of the canvas, often mounted with exposed wooden supports, reinforces the object-like quality of his paintings, moving them away from traditional fine art presentation toward a more visceral, immediate form of expression.