The Dallas Museum has acquired a 1985 painting titled Sam F, by Jean Michel Basquiat. The painting depicts a suit-jacketed man in a wheelchair. It is the first work by Basquiat to enter the institution’s holdings. The work will go on view in Dallas on July 4. The painting was gifted by Dallas based collector Samuel and Helga Feldman to the museum.
Anna Katherine Brodbeck, senior curator of contemporary art at the Dallas Museum, said in a statement, “This painting fills a significant gap in our collection and allows us the opportunity to share with audiences the groundbreaking contributions of Black and Latinx artists to the art world in the 1980s.”
Basquiat painted the work while his stay in the Texas City at the Feldman’s home. A door from their residence ended up acting as a canvas for Sam F. The painting represents Samuel and contains text written in verse, Basquiat’s SAMO tag, and what appears to be a duck.
Basquait has created hundreds og paintings but most of them are in private hands. Critic Bob Nickas found that many major U.S. museum still don’t own Basquiats because they “missed” the market for them during the ’80s, when the artist was still alive (he died in 1988, at age 27). The price of the artist works were far cheaper at that time than they are now. Nickas also wrote that the “unpleasant specters” of racism referred to in Basquiat’s paintings may have deterred many institutions from collecting his work.
Today, the Whitney Museum in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles are rare examples of important U.S. institutions that own Basquiat paintings. Despite Basquiat’s stature within art history, many major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and dozens more, do not own his paintings.