“To whom shall I hire myself? Which Beast must be worshiped?
What holy image attacked? Whose hearts shall I break? What lie
must I uphold? – In what blood shall I wade.”
Arthur Rimbaud, ‘A Season in Hell’, Arthur Rimbaud: Collected Poems, Ed. Oliver Bernard, London: Penguin Classics, 1962, P.306.
At some stage, even the greatest, most highly educated and cultured critics get it wrong, miss the boat or can’t see what’s staring them in the face. Ruskin got Whistler wrong. Greenberg got Warhol wrong, and Robert Hughes got it wrong when he panned Basquiat as a lightweight after Basquiat’s death from a drug overdose in The New Republic in 1988. This article, which I first read in 1991 as part of Nothing if Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists (1990), incensed me so much that I threw the book against the wall.
Looking back at this essay and others by Robert Hughes on Basquiat – I think the Australian got it so wrong in the case of Jean-Michel - though I appreciate the quality of Hughes' brand of acerbic prose. In his essay 'Requiem for a Featherweight' - Hughes panned Basquiat as a “small untrained talent caught in the buzz saw of art-world promotion, absurdly over-rated by dealers, collectors, critics and, not least, himself.” (Robert Hughes, Jean-Michel Basquait: Requiem for a Featherweight, Nothing if Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, P. 308.) Hughes suggested that Basquiat should have gone to Art College and learned some creative discipline and conventional drawing skills: “In a saner culture than this, the twenty-year-old Basquiat might have gone off to four years boot camp in art school, learned some real drawing abilities (as distinct from the pseudo-convulsive notation that was his trademark) and, in general, acquired some of the disciplines and skills without which good art cannot be made. But these were the eighties; instead he became a star.” (Robert Hughes, Jean-Michel Basquait: Requiem for a Featherweight, Nothing if Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990, P. 309.) I don't think there is a dumber notion in all Hughes' writing, and I am all for good skills. The whole point of Basquiat’s work was that he was largely self-taught and unbroken by the nit-picking of tutors or fellow students. If you wanted a graduate, there were already about 35,000 of them coming fresh out of college every year in America!
However, Robert Hughes was not alone in his contempt for Basquiat’s work, and there was a nasty snobbishness, elitism, and unspoken racism hidden in the art reviews written by upper-middle-class white male newspaper art critics before and after Basquiat’s death. They simultaneously declared that he had no talent, and at the same time suggested that any painting they did admire was the product of his studio assistants. These inveterate snobs simply could not believe that a young black homeless man could make such powerful work without any formal training. So, they exaggerated his influences, and demonised his quotations, sneered at his networking and friendship with Warhol, and singled him out from other Neo-Expressionists who also had studio assistants, and made it appear that his assistants were the real geniuses! They said he was a flash in the pan. They said he was a shooting star. But over thirty-four years since his death - his abandoned work makes most of what has come out of New York since look academic, trivial, and lifeless in comparison. Oh, and by the way, virtually all those white male newspaper critics, and most of the sniping racists in the New York art world of the 1980s are now totally forgotten! Whereas Basquiat has become one of the most influential, expensive, studied, and lionized artists in art history! In fact, things today have gone to the other extreme, because the Basquiat family have totally sanitised the image of their son; played down his bisexuality; played down his drug addictions; played down his dependence on the white art world; exaggerated his place in the black community; covered up his selfish, obnoxious character, and manipulation of people; and his exhibition catalogues depict him as an artistic black saint.
Like many young painters since – I could spot the talent of Basquiat immediately. Of course, he was not a first rank master, but he had a startling and stylish debut. Basquiat’s real flaw was that he was a junkie. It was this that destroyed him mentally, physically, and ultimately, artistically. Art critic Waldemar Januszczak warned in The Guardian newspaper in 1990, “God forbid that anyone would try to follow in his footsteps.” (Waldemar Januszczak, New York Exotic, The Guardian, November 17th`-18th, 1990, P. 24.) But I did want to follow in Basquiat’s footsteps! And at age nineteen, I wound have made a similar Faustian bargain if it meant immortality as an artist!
Basquiat had massively influenced my art from June 1990. But it was only in January 1993, that his presence in my work became overbearing. As a largely self-taught artist, I needed artistic outsiders like van Gogh and Basquiat not only for inspiration but also consolation, and hope. But many of my later critics and dealers derided my obvious borrowings from Basquiat’s use of text, diagrams, collage, and skulls. Some of my works from 1990-1995 were little more than perverted, obscene and insane Basquiat’s. However, my early homages to this fellow Punk painter were based on a very limited knowledge of his work, a single painting seen in The Douglas Hyde gallery in 1987, a documentary on him in late November 1990, and a handful of small books. Trapped in Dublin in the pre-internet age – he was a subject of rumour and legend to me.
That changed in late January 1993, when I bought the catalogue from Basquiat’s sensational Whitney Museum retrospective which had been staged in October 1992. This exhibition was the first to treat Basquiat as an historical figure worthy of retrospective analysis. It was the largest selection of paintings by Basquiat that I had seen up to that point - and I was thrilled by his crude, virile drawing style, vibrant colours, and visual sampling. I especially liked the way all of Basquiat's paintings, collages and drawings were delivered without hesitation - directly upon war-torn sheets of paper or ragged canvas. I was delighted by the way he would then tear up, over-paint or censor his previous efforts in a critical fashion. With his words he would reverse or correct spellings, drop vowels and print, or scrawl or stab down letters. I admired the way he made language-based art without ever descending into the boring depths of conceptualism, and ultimately created a form of painting that was uniquely his own.
To a nerdy white boy afraid to leave the house, who had spent his childhood trying to paint within the lines - Basquiat was like a liberator. The fact that he did all of this on his own terms in the dog-eat-dog, all white art world made him a hero to me and gave me some hope that I too could one day beat the system.
However, I hated graffiti – I still do. I thought graffiti was mostly made by dumb, attention seeking, show-offs, and braggarts. I still do. Yet, Basquiat was different. To me he was never really a graffiti artist. He came along in the second wave of Graffiti that had taken hold in New York in the 1970s. His work was more cryptic, conceptual, and intelligent. And he was quick to find himself a way into the gallery system and off the streets. This ‘sell-out’ was why I particularly admired him. He made the leap from mere tagging and writing on walls to easel paintings – enriching and expanding his visual vocabulary and the possibilities of protest, record, and pursuit of aristocratic speech in paint.
In April 1996, I finally managed to see a small retrospective of 25 of his paintings in The Serpentine Gallery, London. Seeing a large mass of his paintings in the flesh for the first time, I was shocked by the sheer size of the paintings, thinking they were like doodles or drawings on a huge scale. I was struck by their decorative quality and stylishness - a mix of Graffiti and Pop. The later work could be surprisingly cool, detached, and Post-Modern in the flesh. They were not as angst-ridden or tight as I had felt they were in reproduction and found his line could be surprisingly whimsical. Some reminded me of de Kooning’s in acrylic - filled with words that loomed as large as heads - pushing your eyes around as neatly as brushstrokes. The colours were very matt, pure colours taken from large pots of Golden acrylic enlivened by oil paint-stick. For all the apparent chaos of these paintings, I found they ‘sat’ quite well and was impressed by his instinctive ability to know when to stop or leave some things unsaid. In later years, I was to see many individual Basquiat paintings and drawings in museums. In the flesh, they were even more impressive than in reproduction, and usually made the surrounding work look drained, lifeless, and calculated to bore.
Now fifty-one-years-old, I have been looking intently at this American’s work for over twenty-eight years, and I am still amazed by his art. Every time I see an exhibition of student work - I think of him - and what he had achieved by their age. Time and again, I find imitators of him, but not one comes even close to the real thing - including myself – one of his most obvious thief's.
Basquiat was one of those incandescent talents that went to the extremes of creativity and life. He had a totally natural and God-given gift for drawing and painting, an amazingly charismatic personality, good looks, a hip understanding of style and the Zeitgeist – and, according to his friends, a large cock! It is true that he lacked the training or skills to produce conventional figurative works, but for a brief few years his raw energy more than made up for his self-taught techniques.
When I was young, like most young art students, I too was attracted to the myth of Basquiat as an icon of rebellion and success – but the truth of his life was much more complex and sordid. Prodigies usually come at the end of a cultural high. They need a supportive structure to recognise, fetishise and elevate their efforts. Cultures in descent usually start casting about for outsiders to enliven their dying art, and New York since the 1970s had become increasingly irrelevant artistically, even if the outward Baroque spending of the 1980s tended to hide this fact. It is telling that when Phoebe Hoban wrote her excellent biography (which I have relied on heavily) ‘Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art’ (1998) - she chose to spend nearly half the book highlighting the New York art world of the 1980s: the new money, the collectors, the dealers and the brashness of an art market in ascent. Basquiat had immense talent, but there was no way he would have been promoted so early and so aggressively in even the New York of the 1960s. After his death and elevation to Iconic status his legacy was to be fought over by what sometimes seems the whole New York art world - all trying to cash in and lay claim to his friendship.
It was the vulgarity of Basquiat’s petit bourgeois ambitions and art that attracted me intensely – just as it had with other forms of Expressionism. Let me quote T. J. Clark here on a previous form of painterly vulgarity: “Abstract Expressionism, I want to say, is the style of a certain petty bourgeoisie’s aspiration to aristocracy, to a totalizing cultural power. It is the art of that moment when the petty bourgeoisie thinks it can speak (and its masters allow it to speak) the aristocrat’s claim to individuality. Vulgarity is the form of that aspiration... Vulgarity, then... is the necessary form of that individuality allowed the petty bourgeoisie. Only that painting will engage and sustain our attention which can be seen to recognize, and in some sense to articulate, that limit condition of its own rhetoric. Maybe it will always be a painting that struggles to valorise that condition even as it lays bare its deficiencies – for here we touch, as Adorno never tired of telling us, on some constitutive (maybe regrettable) link between art and an ethics of reconciliation or transcendence - but what we shall value most in the painting is the ruthlessness of (self)-exposure, the courting of bathos, the unapologetic banality. The victory, if there is one, must always be Pyrrhic.” (T. J. Clark, Farewell To An Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1999, P.389.)
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn Hospital, New York City, on 22ed of December 1960. His domineering father Gerard was from Port-au-Prince in Haiti - then and still the poorest country in the Western World, and under the brutal paternalistic dictatorship of Papa Doc Duvalier. Basquiat grew up desperate for his father’s approval, which near the end he finally achieved. Basquiat’s fragile mother Matilde was the daughter of a Puerto Rican family. Thus Basquiat grew up speaking English, French and Spanish, and all these different languages would later feature in his vast canvases. His work was a Creole mix of the old and the new world – the emotional and the intellectual.
They lived in a Brooklyn brown-stone and enjoyed a comfortable, middle-class existence. Basquiat’s father was an accountant and worked in New Jersey, while his mother was a stay-at-home mom with an interest in art and fashion. Basquiat’s mother later suffered from paranoid-schizophrenia (just one of many affinities I shared with Basquiat), and sadly she has been somewhat written out of his history – a story I think that needs to be eventually told in full. But let me at least hint at its complexity.
It was his mother who encouraged Jean-Michel in his drawing – brought him to museums such as The Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan and M.O.M.A. - where he first saw Picasso’s Guernica. However, according to Jean-Michel, she was also a very strict mother, prone to depression, violence – and had a deep worry line running down her forehead. At the age of seven Basquiat was hit by a car on the street and had to have his spleen removed - it was this and his later abuse of drugs that made him break out in sores all over his skin. While in hospital his mother brought him in a copy of Gray’s Anatomy – an odd present - which emphasized his awareness of his inner organs and their vulnerability. That same year his parents divorced. Matilde was deemed unfit to look after her children and Basquiat and his younger sisters Lisane and Jeanine went to live with their father. When Basquiat was around ten years of age his mother was committed to a mental hospital, and would be in and out of them for years to come. If Jean-Michel’s experience of dealing with a paranoid-schizophrenic mother was even half as bad as mine was – it had to be shattering. Basquiat later said, “I’d say my mother gave me all the primary things. The art came from her.” (Quoted by M. Franklin Sirmans in ‘Jean-Michel Basquiat: Whitney Museum of American Art’, Chronology, Harry N. Abrams, Inc: New York, 1992, P.233.)
As a teenager Basquiat naturally rebelled against his authoritarian and sometimes physically abusive father. Basquiat claimed that one time, when his father caught Jean-Michel smoking pot – he stabbed his son in the leg. He ran away from home a number of times - living on the streets, dropping acid, and panhandling. Not surprisingly, he also dropped out of a series of schools. His last - City-as-School in Manhattan – was a highly liberal, progressive establishment which encouraged self-directed learning (a later feature of his work which made the mental process central.) The children, most of whom were bright, creative, albeit difficult pupils – were encouraged to use New York City’s museums, libraries, theatres, and cinemas as their classroom.
Basquiat’s teachers remembered him as utterly obsessed with art, drawing and comics – but also as a truant, hustler and drug user. He had the needy personality of an abused child - eager for approval yet wilfully rebellious.
While in City-as-School he wrote for the school newspaper – creating a bogus religion called SAMO (Same Old Shit), which also featured in his early comic book style drawings. Around the same time in City-as-School – Basquiat met Al Diaz, a young graffiti artist who tagged the trains and subways of New York City. The two formed an alliance, and in 1977, they began writing SAMO graffiti around SoHo and the East Village – anywhere that arty, important people might see it. Dodging the cops - they quickly scrawled in spray-paint witty and cryptic phrases such as:
“SAMO saves idiots,”
“Plush safe he think; SAMO”
“SAMO as an end to mindwash religion and bogus philosophy.”
At the age of seventeen Basquiat finally ran away from home for good. He lived on the streets, sold his body for rent, and slept on the floor of friends’ apartments. Everywhere he lived he covered with his crude but powerful drawings. On the streets of Manhattan he sold handmade postcards. He became a regular at the Mudd Club, where he danced like a loping robot. With Vincent Gallo, Michael Holman and Shannon Dawson, he formed a band named Channel 9, later renamed Gray. He tried to meet Andy Warhol, but these first attempts were ignored by Andy who was frightened of this young black man who, in Warhol’s diaries, later constantly said “smelled.”
Meanwhile Basquiat and Diaz’s graffiti was attracting the attention of the art community. On December 11th 1978 an article about SAMO appeared in ‘The Village Voice’ written by Philip Faflick. However, after bitter disagreements with Diaz in 1979 - Basquiat broke up the partnership – and tags with “SAMO is dead” appeared around SoHo. According to Diaz, “Jean-Michel saw SAMO as a vehicle, the graffiti was an advertisement for himself... all of a sudden he just started taking it over.” (Quoted by M. Franklin Sirmans in ‘Jean-Michel Basquiat: Whitney Museum of American Art’, Chronology, Harry N. Abrams, Inc: New York, 1992, P.236.) Only two years after Basquiat’s death, Diaz in an interview on the ‘Shooting Star’ documentary bitterly said, “I think he was definitely a evil guy. I think there was more evil in him than good. So in his face is real... real charming but real deceptive. Like his eyes looking at you... knowing... looking right through you.” (‘Shooting Star’, Without Walls, Channel Four, Director Jeff Dunlop, 1990.) Diaz may have been right in part, but his views were surely tinged with jealousy.
Basquiat also became friends with fellow artists Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring with whom he would have an on-and-off and on again relationship with until the end. In 1979 he began to appear as a regular on Glenn O’Brien’s cable access television show TV Party, which had only a few hundred viewers and many of them only watched so they could phone in and mercilessly mock its guests. However, Basquiat and Glenn O’Brien became good friends. At the Mudd club, Basquiat met Diego Cortez, an artist and filmmaker with connections to the inner art world. Cortez introduced Basquiat to Henry Geldzahler, who became an early collector of Basquiat’s work.
From the outset Basquiat wanted to enter the art world’s inner-circle. He crashed openings, gorged on the free food and cheap wine - and made connections. He was guarded in his speech and quick to ridicule. When he wanted to he could charm anyone, though he was not known for his humour. Many people knew him – but few were really his friends. I suspect his greatest friend was his art.
As the old will tell you, the art world dream, much like the American dream, is pure fiction – no more based in reality than the lottery or electoral system. For every one winner there are literally millions of losers. But Basquiat was a winner, in at least artistic and monetary terms – and what a winner! I can think of no other artist in the past 150 years who had so much fame, money and success at such a young age. Thousands of black, Hispanic and poor white boys made Graffiti in the late 1970s and early 1980s, many of whom were courted and promoted by the new galleries in New York – but apart from Basquiat and Haring – all were drowned by the tides of fad and fashion. Basquiat stood out because his creative ambitions were larger than mere adolescent graffiti – he wanted entry into the Pantheon of Western art! In pursuit of his goal he devoured art books and created an outsider’s take on modernism. His great idea was to paint like a child again – yet he added to it the worldliness of a life on the streets, in conjunction with a passion for Modern masters like Picasso, Jean Dubuffet and Karel Appel, who had themselves reinvented their own childhood instincts. To his text he began adding a growing lexicon of signs and symbols: the crown, the copyright symbol, the skull, the mask, and the names of famous black sportsmen like Hank Aaron, who had also endured racist abuse.
In 1980, things really began taking off for Basquiat. In June of that year he exhibited publicly for the first time in ‘The Times Square’ group show of East Village artists, and his work was mentioned in ‘Art in America’ by Jeffery Deitch. In his review of the show Deitch wrote: “A patch of wall by SAMO, the omnipresent graffiti sloganeer, was a knock-out combination of de Kooning and subway spray-paint scribbles.” (Quoted by M. Franklin Sirmans in ‘Jean-Michel Basquiat: Whitney Museum of American Art’, Chronology, Harry N. Abrams, Inc: New York, 1992, P.237.)
At the end of the year he was the star in the low-budget film; ‘Downtown 81’ (later released as ‘New York Beat’) – in which he played a struggling artist. The film was deceptive in that it placed Basquiat amidst the derelict ruins of Alphabet City – and not the middle-class Brooklyn home which he actually grew up in. With his fees from the film Basquiat was able to buy canvases and paint. He also sold a piece for $100 to Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie.
In February 1981, he was featured in ‘New York/New Wave’ at PS1, a group show organized by Diego Cortez. His work caught the attention of dealers such as Emilio Mazzoli, Bruno Bischofberger, and Annina Nosei. Nosei offered him a place in her upcoming show ‘Public Address’ - but Basquiat had no money for canvases or a studio in which to work. So she offered him the basement of her gallery. He jumped at the offer and thus began his seven year explosion of creativity - fuelled by marijuana, cocaine, heroin and crack. Collectors pulled up in their limousines and carted off still wet and sometimes unfinished canvases for up to $10,000 a pop. This would turn out to be an excellent investment – these canvases now sell at auction for millions. Gossip soon circulated about this strange arrangement, and talk of a wild man off the streets painting in a basement quickly ensued. It all smacked of exploitation and slavery. Basquiat soon tired of this arrangement and moved on within a year. Over the next few years he had a series of dealers who tolerated his erratic behaviour, because he was famous and a money-maker.
When the December 1981 article, ‘The Radiant Child’ by Rene Ricard appeared in ArtForum, it was to be the first major piece written about Basquiat. It was a wonderfully evocative and street-savvy essay worthy of the poets of Paris, even if Ricard tried too hard to be cool and wise, but then again, don’t we all? “I’m always amazed by how people come up with things. Like Jean-Michel. How did he come up with those words he puts all over everything? Their aggressively handmade look fits his peculiarly political sensibility... Here the possession of almost anything of even marginal value becomes a token of corrupt materialism... The elegance of Twombly is there but from the same source (graffiti) and so is the brut of the young Dubuffet.” (Rene Ricard Quoted by M. Franklin Sirmans in ‘Jean-Michel Basquiat: Whitney Museum of American Art’, Chronology, Harry N. Abrams, Inc: New York, 1992, P.239.)
Basquiat understood from an early age that image is everything in the modern world. His hair and clothes became calling cards for his genius. His black dreads sticking up in the air became a moniker as recognizable (at least to art students) as Dalí’s moustache or Warhol’s silver wigs. He was said to change his hair every two weeks.
He shaped his identity as cunningly as Oscar Wilde, James McNeill Whistler, Egon Schiele, Andy Warhol or David Bowie (who in 1996 - played Warhol wonderfully in Schnabel’s biopic ‘Basquiat’.) Since the art world was and still is so entwined with the media culture – artists have had to have a character to play, a story to tell and a style as recognizable as a Coca-Cola bottle or McDonald's logo. Basquiat did not have a deep introspective character - but he played his stylish cards to the hilt. He acted out stereotypes of himself as a wild-child when it suited him - but he also felt the backlash when his role became ridiculed. He was derided as a mascot for a hypocritical and politically correct art world - run and largely populated by whites whose only daily interaction with African-Americans were with their shoeshine men, hotel maids, and apartment block porters. The battle was too big for him alone. Most artists - regardless of their skin colour or social background - are nothing but small pawns in the art world casino. Basquiat was born understanding fame – but he had to learn the price of other people’s envy.
I would like to avoid his fame – I don’t want to descend into the snot of celebrity news – but at least a brief list of his crass successes deserves to be mentioned. He finally succeeded in enchanting Warhol and became a regular at ‘The Factory’, even encouraging Warhol to begin painting by hand again. They became inseparable on the social scene for a few years. Warhol enjoyed feeding off the energy of young artists - whereas Basquiat wanted to learn the art game from the master - even if that master had sucked the life out of many previous acolytes. Basquiat dated Madonna for a few months in 1982 – it could never last as she loathed drugs and the self-destructive ethos. Basquiat modelled shyly for Comme Des Garcons, and featured in a one minute filler on MTV. At his peak he was making over one and a half million dollars per year from his art. Not bad for a black boy who had lived in a cardboard box in Washington Square Park!
But none of this bullshit has anything to do with the quality of his art and why it still impresses. The truly important fact is his work ethic. In nine years, he created over 1,000 huge canvases and over 2,000 drawings. In 1982, alone he painted over 300 canvases! Of course in such a large oeuvre (especially one so pumped up on drugs), there were a lot of thoughtless, crass and cynical works. But there was also a surprising body of genuine masterpieces worthy of Picasso, Matisse, Pollock or Dubuffet.
I have never shown a woman a book on Basquiat who hasn’t cried out, “Oh, he’s hot!” The women loved him and literally hung around his studio door looking for a fuck and an art work. Apart from Suzanne Mallouk – he never went out with ethnic women - and most of his girlfriends were blond WASP types looking for a bit of rough (one of the reasons Al Diaz finished with Basquiat was because he said Basquiat had spat in the face of one of their girlfriends while fucking her.) Yet women or sex for that matter never featured much in his work. Some of his closest friends said he preferred men and that his one true love was his unrequited father/son relationship with Warhol. Though as Glenn O’Brian said, “I don’t think Andy had a paternalistic bone in his body.” (‘Shooting Star’, Without Walls, Channel Four, Director Jeff Dunlop, 1990.) His canvases and agitated drawings depicted broken, defaced, and menaced black men. He retold the stories of black musicians like Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, and boxers such as Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson – tales of prejudice, racism, exploitation, betrayal and martyred heroics.
The power of Basquiat’s work resided in its confrontational and anarchistic dance with the art world. He was a black cultural raider who pillaged Western Art. The history of modernism was a history of cultural pirates. Artists like Picasso, Matisse and Kirchner, who robbed the culture of Africa as aggressively as their Colonial military leaders in France and Germany pillaged the natural resources of ‘The Dark Continent’. In fact, the very reason their sacred masks were in European museums at all was because they had been looted by the same men who had raped, enslaved, murdered, tortured and exploited the African population.
It is a story so familiar in the West that we hardly recognise its significance. The West has been built upon the multi-cultural theft, pastiche or copying of examples from: the Middle East, India, Japan, China and Africa. But no matter how much we rob from others – we in the West regard other races who copy our example with suspicion, and frequently, derision. We acknowledge their power of expression, but we disparage their lack of sophistication or understanding.
In contrast, what we see in Basquiat is a reversal of this process – a young black man plundering Western masters like Picasso, Dubuffet, Pollock, de Kooning, Twombly and Da Vinci - to create an art even more energetic, explosive and raw.
There had been other black artists in the Western tradition - but none of them possessed Basquiat’s self-confidence, energy or originality. Most of their work was too academic, second-hand and contrived to ever be considered as truly great art. The secret to Basquiat’s brilliance was his ‘fuck you’ attitude towards the Western tradition and his anti-art stance. It was almost as if he was saying, “This Modernist and Western art you think so profound and difficult is easy for me!” His work was like a spit in the face of Modernist art, and yet strangely it was one of the few credible examples of Post-Modern or Neo-Expressionist resuscitation of the avant-garde corpse. Compared to Basquiat – Schnabel, Clemente and Fetting were mere posers.
In 1982, at the age of just twenty-one - he was featured in Documenta VII in Kassel, West Germany – he was the youngest artist ever to be honoured in such a way. The same year the committee in Kassel refused to show the equally famous Julian Schnabel, some eleven years Basquiat’s senior. It was achievements such as this which made me envious.
By 1982-3, he had assistants like Stephen Torton and Shenge Ka Pharaoah working in his studio: stretching canvases, collaging his Xeroxed drawings onto cotton-duck, and filling in base colours with Golden and Liquitex acrylic paints - but not, we are led to believe – doing anything important like adding or crossing out words and masks. I wonder? He would send them out to collect any old surface for him to paint on: doors, fences, windowpanes. Torton in particular created a series of roughly lashed together canvases - which worked brilliantly with Basquiat’s aesthetics of improvised assault. Basquiat’s paintings assembled a growing framework of society seen from the gutter and penthouse – capital, labour, exchange, commodities, street justice and law. Thus in some respects his work could be read as a satire on society.
Henry Geldzahler: Is there anger in your work now?
Jean-Michel Basquiat: It’s about 80% anger. Henry Geldzahler: But there’s also humor?
Jean-Michel Basquiat: People laugh when you fall on your ass. What’s humor?
Interview Magazine, New York, January 1983, Brant Publications, Inc.
By the early 1980s, Basquiat was spending over $2,000 per week on coke and grass. He would spend weeks holed up in his Jones Street loft (which he rented from Warhol) listening to Charlie Parker, shooting up heroin, and painting and drawing for days on end in his paint-smeared Armani suits. His assistant Torton recalled in an interview with Phoebe Hoban that Basquiat would freebase crack-cocaine, puke in a bin, paint, freebase, puke and paint for days on end without sleep. It is desperate realities like this that his hagiographers try to gloss over. It is also what gave his work its intense lunges towards aesthetic and social liberation. I never admired his drug taking and still don’t – it was his Achilles heel.
Where Basquiat’s drug taking did matter was in the grammar of his paintings. The drug cocktails he induced and their giddy highs and emptied-out lows were evident in his paintings. It gave his work of 1981-83 its frenetic intensity and whiff of sulphur. It also gave his work of 1986-88 its drained, fragile and morbid quality.
I would love to know at exactly what stage of the drug buzz Basquiat painted certain canvases. Some of his work is crammed with text, slashes of paint, skulls, masks and anatomy drawings – while others are shocking in their minimalism – a sweep of colour and a telling phrase. However - I would also caution against an exaggerated dramatization of his painting on drugs. From personal experience I can testify that one can easily develop a tolerance for drugs or drink. For example, it always amuses me to see people floored by joints - which I smoke like cigarettes.
Cocaine is an ego drug – it creates unshakable self-belief, yet it also robs the user of all self-criticality and almost instantly creates paranoia – and one sees this in Basquiat’s work. It gives his canvases their intensity but it also explains in part the underdeveloped nature of his oeuvre. The vast majority of world-class masterpieces in painting were created by artists in their fourth decade. The great works of maturity and old age come after prolonged self-analysis and intellectual growth – but Basquiat never achieved this maturation because his personality was frozen in a white line blizzard and he was determined not to grow up. Some might say that Basquiat never had the chance to mature – true – but Egon Schiele died at the same age and Schiele’s last work really did show a growing sensitivity, openness, and complexity.
Basquiat’s burgeoning friendship with Warhol encouraged him to silkscreen his drawings onto canvas which he then over-painted. It made the works look arty and professional, at the expense of emotional charge. Basquiat had used Xeroxes to copy his drawings before this time, but these black-and-white or colour reproductions retained a quaint handmade charge. Basquiat also increasingly parodied commercial logos, brand names and the products of affluence. These riffs on corporate products were quite successful – battering impersonal graphic designs with personalized assertions of identity.
In 1984, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel began to work on a series of collaborative canvases. The idea of two or more artists working together was briefly popular in the Post-Modern art world of the early 1980s. In Germany, Neo-Expressionist painters like Walter Dahn and Jiři Georg Dokoupil had worked together, and in New York, painters like David Salle and Julian Schnabel had also briefly collaborated. Typically, these dual efforts paled in comparison to the work these artists produced individually.
Even a Basquiat fanatic such as me can find the efforts of Warhol and Basquiat, or Basquiat, Warhol and Clemente – empty, cynical and soulless. But it was Basquiat who came off looking worse. The core value of his art was its authenticity – but in these canvases his line appeared dead - his energy drained and his practice too self-conscious. In his diaries Warhol noted that some days he literally had to drag Jean-Michel’s hand around the canvas because he was so doped up on heroin. But other days he was stunned by Basquiat’s “masterpieces.” The show was a disaster both critically and financially. Their friendship soon ended. But it was Warhol’s death in 1987 which truly finished Basquiat off. Warhol had been the only person Basquiat respected enough to listen to. Jean-Michel had tried to take Warhol's advice - to curb his drug use, to exercise, to see his mother and to slow down.
By 1986, Basquiat was burned out. He travelled constantly but to no real purpose. He became paranoid, reclusive, and increasingly irrelevant in an art world that had moved on from the slap-dash egotistical spasms of Neo-Expressionism to the cool cynicism of Neo-Geo and the found and re-presented commercial object.
But before the end there was one last sensational exhibition in Verj Baghoomian’s gallery in SoHo. Baghoomian was a shady art world character, but one of the few dealers left at the time that would support the increasingly self-destructive Basquiat. By then Jean-Michel had gone through dozens of dealers including Annina Nosei, Tony Shafrazi, Mary Boone, Larry Gagosian and Bruno Bischofberger. His last paintings had a sparse, frail and sullied quality that clearly indicated a dying of the light.
On Friday 12Th August 1988 – Jean-Michel died in his Great Jones Street loft of a multiple drugs overdose. Over 300 people attended a remembrance service in St. Peter’s Church in Manhattan.
At the time of his death, the highest price paid for one of his canvases was $30,000 - a year after his death they were selling for over $280,000! Moreover, his estate was valued at nearly four million dollars. Death really was the best career move Basquiat ever made. With the stock market collapse of 1987, the boom times were over and Warhol’s and Basquiat’s respective deaths signalled the end of an era.
In 1996, Julian Schnabel released a film on Jean-Michel called simply ‘Basquiat.’ When I first saw it in the autumn of 1996, I was disgusted by it. The fact-lover in me abhorred all the wilful inaccuracies, the confusing consolidation of characters as well as Schnabel’s hijacking of Basquiat’s fame, Schnabel’s placing of his own paintings throughout the movie and the use of Schnabel’s imitations of Basquiat paintings. Basquiat’s character was made out to be far more innocent, passive, and dreamy than he ever actually was. However, overall, the film had its Romantic charms and I watched it about twenty times over the years. Yet for Hilton Kramer, Jean-Michel Basquiat had everything but talent, “He was essentially a talentless hustler, street-smart but otherwise invincibly ignorant, who used his youth, his looks, his skin colour and his abundant sex appeal to win an overnight fame that proved to be his undoing.” (Hilton Kramer, He Had Everything but Talent, The Telegraph, 22ed March 1997.)
If Basquiat had lived, would we still care as much about his art? I doubt it. Few prodigies achieve the leap from l’enfant terrible to master, regardless of whether or not they are drug addicts. There is no doubt that Basquiat’s premature death at the age of twenty-seven gave his oeuvre a supercharged boost after flagging for some time. And, it encapsulated his epic life story - elevating him to the pantheon of teenage heroes with the likes of Egon Schiele, James Dean and Jimi Hendrix.
At the end of the day - graffiti was about aggression - it was about provocation - it was about existential declarations of freedom in the cage of the city - and all of these sentiments fuelled Basquiat’s art. His best canvases (1981-1984) were covered in layer after layer of collaged drawings, hand-written text in fat oil paint-sticks, painted and defaced masks and skulls in slathered acrylic paint – plus a visual sampling of everything including: the secret signs of hobos, comic book illustrations, anatomy drawings, old master paintings, Da Vinci drawings, and the labelling on commercial products. In reproduction his canvases appeared congested – but in the flesh their huge scale created room for his constructions to breathe. What you see in them is the awakening consciousness of a young black man. They were as much about writing as about painting. They were as much about erasure as declaration. They were as much about learning as they were about mastery. At his best he was an inventive colourist, a daring designer, and a compelling raw draughtsman. Technically they were often very simplistic and easily copied – but he coined this realm.
Nowadays people babble on incessantly about ‘ideas’ in art - and this is usually thought to be seen best in conceptual objects – which I personally find dry, tedious, and pretentious. However, in Basquiat’s paintings there were hundreds of ideas: how you put words and images together, how you paint and edit, how you draw and conceptualize, and how gestures and lunges of paint can still signify the human soul in ecstasy, agony and resignation. His work was more than mere ideas – it was thoughts embodied in a life!