The Art of Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in 1960s New York after over 1.5 million middle and upper-class white Americans moved out to the suburbs to avoid housing and school integration. Long-suppressed tensions between different races and ethnic communities have resulted in a rise in violent crimes. Buildings were faced with up to 80% vacancy. Arson became rampant so that landlords could collect the insurance money. The remaining apartments were rented cheaply to migrants from Latin America and Puerto Rico.

Part Haitian, part Puerto Rican, his parents were among the new population in this fast-deteriorating city, where union strikes often halted public programs, including schools. Children and teens were left unattended while their parents were unable to afford daycare.

Now’s the Time exhibit, Toronto, 2015

This was the landscape of Basquiat’s childhood – a Lower East Side of burnt-out buildings and abandoned businesses, vandalized with layers of graffiti, the streets filled with trash and drugs. Ironically, it would become just the place for his kind of raw art. The entire city was his very first canvas.

Luckily, his parents directly (and indirectly) fueled his artistic start. His Caribbean background inspired loud, bright colors and multicultural themes. He could read and write by age four in a home where they spoke English, French, Spanish and Creole. His father, who worked as an accountant, brought home pages of blank of paper for him to draw on. His mother often took him to the great museums of New York, even making him a member of the Brooklyn Museum at the age of six.

After a near-fatal car accident where he suffered broken bones and internal injuries, his mother brought him a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, the seminal 1858 textbook containing text and illustrations of the human anatomy, so he could better understand his own injuries. He poured over the book during his long recovery. Little did she know how much it would influence his art, evident in Basquiat’s iconic skeletal figures of part bone and teeth heads and part African masks.

Gold Griot, 1984. The Broad LA

At a time when universities had burgeoning art departments headed by master artists, Basquiat was completely self-taught – which is why his work is so unique. He visited the Met regularly, admiring works by Carravagio, Picasso and the abstract expressionists. Many of his paintings were homages to Jean Debuffet, Twombly and De Kooning. He was an avid reader – ancient myths, poetry, Mark Twain, Burroughs – literature he incorporated into his art. He practiced drawing by copying da Vinci. Everyone remembers the young Basquiat as surprisingly knowledgeable of politics and art history. Unable to afford art supplies, he started dragging in discarded doors and windows to paint on while selling color copy postcards for $1. He was resourceful, and his early works were collages from salvaged materials.

He spent endless hours in the streets of New York, spray-painting graffiti that was more abstract literature than art. Most of them were in Soho, close to the upscale art galleries. He had a clear sense of how to use public space and get noticed. Tagged as SAMO, his graffiti was compelling and poetic and quickly caught the attention of everyone, including the more erudite art world. At that time, Soho galleries mainly featured minimalist art – Elsworth Kelly, Frank Stella – while the art of the younger counterculture generation was largely ignored.

Untitled, 1981. The Broad LA

This began to change in 1977 when a collective formed between these new artists. Colab was open to everyone and put together socially and politically-driven shows. Basquiat was included in its radical Times Square Show, which was held in an abandoned massage parlor in the red light district. This was followed by the even more successful New York/New Wave show at PS1MoMA where Basquiat caught the eye of art dealer Annina Nosei, who likened his paintings to jazz music. She provided him with art materials and let him work at her bottom-floor studio. The next year, Basquiat sold out his first solo show on the first night. Word spread that a genius was working in Nosei’s basement.

Glenn, 1985. MoMA NY

In 1982, at age 21, Basquiat was the youngest artist included in Documenta in Kassel, Germany, an international contemporary exhibition held every five years. The following year, he also was included in the Whitney Biennial, again the youngest and the first Black artist to be featured, thus paving the way. It was a well-deserved vindication in the white male-dominated world of abstract art.

Basquiat was once driven out of a gallery where he went to meet Cy Twombly – Twombly’s partner suspecting him of being a thief. Early dealers and collectors who purchased his work thought he was French because of his last name, not considering the elements of African-American elements and poetry in his work nor that some of his paintings are of Black musicians and athletes. Museums were reluctant to display him and often rejected collectors willing to lend them his paintings.

But no matter, a show at the Galleria Mazzoli in Moderna was quickly followed by a string of gallery shows in Rome, Tokyo and Los Angeles, some selling out before the shows even opened. The international art dealer Bruno Bischofberger encouraged his collaboration with Andy Warhol, catapulting him to even greater fame.

Obnoxious Liberals, 1982. The Broad LA

But it was becoming increasingly difficult for the young Basquiat to keep up with both the demand and criticism of his art. Some said his paintings were too wild and amateur, while buyers had certain expectations of what they wanted him to paint. Another artist torn apart by the downside of success and fame. This was 1980s Manhattan, the famous last era of waywardly art martyrs when the city was filled with hundreds of self-proclaimed painters, performers, and writers, and drugs and ideas flowed too freely. He would succumb to a common curse, dying of a heroin overdose at the age of 27.

Looking back, the same academics who dismissed him now admit he helped define the future of contemporary art and that the reason for his success was that he really deserved it. Today, the street graffiti that launched his career is long gone, but in the work that survived – 600 paintings, 5,000 drawings, and composition notebooks – the social commentary still resonates in the glyphic writings that show he cared as much about words as colors and figures. And I love him most for that.