Star of the New York art scene in the 80s, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s explosive works are setting the Modern Art Museum of Paris alight. Talented, good-looking and ambitious, Basquiat would have been 50 this year had he not succumbed to an overdose aged just 27.
Hard to imagine Basquiat at 50. The poster of this major retrospective of his work shows him striking a pose in his studio at the height of his career. He’s barefoot, his hair is a mess and there’s paint on his trousers.
“But the suit is Armani,” says curator Marie-Sophie Carron de la Carrière, “he was very image-conscious.”
Basquiat runs at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris till 30 January 2011.
This was the 80s after all: Wall Street, a booming art market and all that.
“What’s striking is that he has this juvenile air, he’s a child, but at the same time he’s aware of his status as an artist,” she adds.
Basquiat’s rise to fame and fortune was meteoric: from graffiti beginnings in 1977 to darling of the New York art scene by his death in 1988. Of his 1,000 paintings and 2,000 drawings, the most highly prized are now valued at up to 10 million dollars apiece.
But Basquiat thought hard about how to get there.
Even alongside fellow graffiti artist Al Diaz, with whom he developed a kind of underground poetic oeuvre using the pseudonym Samo (Same Old Shit), he set his sights high. They would tag the walls of downtown Manhattan with obscure critical declamations and poetic formulae such as SAMO©SAVES IDIOTS.
“He didn’t tag train platforms,” says de la Carrière, “he went for big walls, places that would be visible to the public, and from a long way off. He knew that to succeed he’d have to set himself apart: get the best contracts, the best buyers, be in the best places. And in a very short time he’d fulfilled that contract.”
The exhibition brings together more than 100 major pieces: large canvases, drawings and even art objects such as his graffiti-covered fridge and a football helmet sprouting human hair.
The paintings are big and bursting with energy, the reflection of a wide variety of influences ranging from sacred voodoo rites, mythology, comics, advertising and media through to heroes of African-American music and boxing.
Many are Untitled, exploding with saturated colours and obsessively repeated words and letters. They’re rather like palimpsests, where layers of paint and pastel are laid down, blended with drawings to build up collage and then in some cases etched away to “reveal” images such as faces. The graffiti style suggests they’re done hurriedly but de la Carrière says he spent a lot of time on them.
“He often complained galleries were in a hurry to take them away before they were finished.”
Born of a Haitian father and Porto Rican mother, Basquiat’s work is awash with black faces and skulls, some of which “can be seen as self-portraits,” says de la Carrière.
One Untitled featuring a large skull looks like an x-ray showing the rooms inside his head, even the roots of his teeth. It borders on the macabre. Some of his later works evoke death in a very direct way, such as Eroica I and Eroica II (1988) using “man dies” as a slogan.
But while Basquiat may be the subject of many of his works, the artist looks outwards too, questioning notions of black identity. In Slave Trade (1982) a white auctioneer offers up a massive skull with a spiky crown of thorns, exploring the history of Africans arriving in America.
Kings, heroes and the street are three recurrent themes in his work. And while he saw himself as king of the art world, his heroes were more likely to be from the world of sport or music.
Several paintings celebrate icons of black culture, from boxing champions like Cassius Clay, Jack Johnson, and Sugar Ray Robinson to jazz musicians like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. In Now’s the Time (1985) Basquiat has transformed a large disk-shaped piece of wood into a black LP. Marked with a ring of white chalk and the words “Now’s the time, PRKR”, it’s a tribute to the jazzman Birdy himself.
In an interview he gave to French newspaper Libération in 1986, Basquiat said he possessed a kind of African cultural memory even though he hadn’t yet visited the continent and only did so once, to Côte d’Ivoire, later in the same year.
“Africa was a kind of dream, a fantasy he pursued,” explains de la Carrière. “This African cultural memory was part of him. He used this spiritual dimension, the animism, the spirits, the ghosts. In a painting like Repelling Ghosts you can see he’s preoccupied by the spirit world. It was an endless quest.”
Basquiat the African? It was a double edged sword. After all he was influenced as much by Picasso and Pollock as “negro kings” and griots. De la Carriere says there is indeed some ambiguity in his work.
“This ambiguity is part of what makes his work so rich,” she says. “[And yet] he was very concerned when terms like naïve or primitive were applied to his art. He took it badly because for him it was a form of racism which was still present in the 80s”.
The artist had a sense of auto-derision however, often turning the cliché of the black man on its head. A photo in the exhibition catalogue, taken at the celebrity Chow’s restaurant, shows Basquiat surrounded by an array of white stars like Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe and Keith Haring. Wearing bow tie and holding a plate as if there to serve the other guests, he nonetheless stares defiantly at the camera, sure of himself and his right to be up there with the big boys.
Basquiat was a successful black man in a white art scene, and a contemporary of Barack Obama. They both broke through that old glass ceiling.
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