Basquiat libro

Jean-Michel

Basquiat BROOKLYN MUSEUM

ERIC FRETZ

Eric Fretz

Is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York. He studied art and art history at Hampshire College, Amherst MA, and the Art Students League and CUNY Gr aduate School at Hunter College in New York City. He also spent several years living in London working for the National Health Service. He is a long-time observer of the New York art scene. Eric is now active in Brooklyn for Peace.

Jean-Michel

Basquiat

by Eric Fretz

Brooklyn Museum

PREFACE My aim in writing this book is to produce a biography of ]ean~Michel Basquiat that is based on a critical respect for his work. 1 have tried to place that work in the context of his life and times in a way that does not sensationalize but is interesting and accessible for readers coming to the subject for the first time. The book describes his life and follows a chronological pattern, while striving to give a flavor of the milieus he lived in. His work deals with important themes, especially African American history, and so the book includes brief descriptions of some figures found in his art.

Looking at his work provides an opportunity to learn some of the ways that art critics and art historians, in fact anyone who wants to appreciate art, look at and understand a work. This is not an art book, based on plates of color pictures, which often gets looked at but goes unread. lt attempts to provide an interest» ing story of a life. But what makes Basquiat’s complex life especially interesting is how many of the strands come together in individual artworks.

Each work discussed in the text is listed in an appendix, giving details and references to available books or online sources that illustrate the Work in full color. The author’s Web site, wwwbasquiatbiography. corn, was constructed especially to support this book, giving links to pictures of the Works discussed, extra commentary,

CONTENTS

11

BROOKLYN CHILDHOOD

17

Early training and mature period

21

the artist

27

warhol and jean

31

LEGACY

If you’re not trying to be real, you don’t have to get it right. That’s art.

Andy Warhol

Jean-Michel Basquiat (American, 1960–1988). Untitled, 1982.

Acrylic, spray paint, and oilstick on canvas, 721/8 x 681/8 in. (183.2 x 173 cm). Collection of Yusaku Maezawa. © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York

BROOKLYN CHILDHOOD Artist jean-Michel Basquiat is associated with downtown Manhattan: the SoHo galleries, his nearby studio lofts, and the downtown club and music scenes. Yet his father, Gerard Basquiat, noted the influence on his early work of his Brooklyn childhood. “]ean~Michel grew up in Brook» lyn,” said Gerard. “A lot of the imagery, I feel, is Brooklyn born.”

In 1955, Gerard Basquiat moved from Haiti to Brooklyn, New York, to escape the political instability that had plagued his country for decades. That same year, a political coup, one in a long series, brought to power yet another dictator. Gerard, at age 20, was also undoubtedly seeking a better life for himself. Once in Brooklyn, he enrolled in night school to study accounting. Soon after that, he met and married Matilde Andradas, a young Puerto Rican woman. His parents had radically different temperaments: his mother had the sensibility of an artist and about his father he was an accountant. It was his mother who encouraged and nurtured ]ean~Michel’s creativity. His father on the other hand was stern and exacting. Matilde was plagued by depression and mental instability and it was Gerard who be came the mainstay of the family. In fact, their marriage would fall apart by the time ]ean~Michel was eight. These contradictions within the makeup of his family would probably play an important role in shaping and defining the young artist. It has been noted that “from his father, ]ean~Michel learned confidence and toughness” and from his mother, “he learned to place this toughness in a creative presence.”

11

Poison Oasis Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1981

When ]ean-Michel was born, Gerard and Matilde had moved to Park Slope, “an integrated middle class section of Brooklyn” as he later later told an interviewer about his middle»class upbringing, “I grew up in a, you know, a pretty typical American vacuum.”° He would also say: “My childhood was really just ordinary,” ignoring some rather turbulent later years.7 From the beginning, his multilingual and multiethnic environment gave him a unique perspective on life. He learned French (though not Creole) from his father. His mother spoke English and some French, but to her children she spoke in “Caribbean Spanish.”8 And so ]ean»Michel, fluent in three languages from an early age, effortlessly switched from one to the other according to his audience: Spanish with his mother and her side of the family, French with his father, and English in his everyday life. ]ean Michel “was absolutely so bright, absolutely an unbelievable mind. He drew

12

and painted all of his life from the time he was three or four years old,” his father remembered proudly.° One photo» graph from these early years shows ]ean»Michel concentrating on his drawing, with a pencil in one hand and other pencils stuck into his hair. His mother would sometimes sit next to him at the table while ]ean»Michel drew his pictures based on cars and TV cartoons on paper his father brought home from the office. ]ean Michel remembered his mother “drawing stuff out of the bible, like Samson breaking the tem» ple down.” His mother’s artistic flair was now mostly expressed in her neat and color»coordinated house, but she had an interest in sketching and had done a little fashion design in the past. “His mother got him started and she pushed him,” his father later recalled, “She was actually a very good artist.”n ]ean»Michel agreed when asked about it later in life: “I’d say my mother gave me all the primary things. The art came from his mother.

The family was still living in Park Slope when ]ean»Michel’s sisters were born, Lisane in 1963, andjeanine in 1966. Soon afterjeanine was born, the family moved to a larger place, a house in East Flatbush, farther out in Brooklyn. East Flatbush was a largely white, working»class neighbor» hood. In the mid 1960s the population of East Flatbush was just start» ing to shift from jewish and Italian to Caribbean. The move to East Elatbush was one of many during ] ean Michel’s childhood. ]ust as turbulent for him were all the different schools he attended following these moves around Brooklyn. In 1967, soon after arriving in East Elatbush, ]ean Michel started at Saint Ann’s, a newly established private school in Brooklyn. It shows the importance his parents gave to education, it was a nonsectarian school where intellectually curious students were encouraged to learn for the sake of the learning itself, not for grades. He was a bright young child, and by age seven was already a prolific reader in all of his three languages.

ust as turbulent for him were all the different schools he attended following these moves around Brooklyn. In 1967, soon after arriving in East Elatbush, ]ean»Michel started at Saint Ann’s, a newly established private school in Brooklyn. It shows the impor» tance his parents gave to education that they managed to send him to this already well»regarded school, rather than to the free public school nearby.

Untitled Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1981

This was part of a general “white flight” from Brooklyn and other inner city areas.

In the 1960s New York City saw a net loss of half a million white residents. As whites became more affluent and moved to the suburbs, they were replaced with African Americans and African Caribbean families.

Today, Elatbush is a large Caribbean neighborhood, with immigrants from the English, Spanish, and Creole speaking islands. The move to East Elatbush was one of many during ]ean»Michel’s childhood. ]

13

“I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I’d draw a big ram’s head, really messy. I’d never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect Spiderman.”

Jean-Michel Basquiat Although attached to an Episcopalian Church, it was a nonsectarian school where intellectually curious students were encouraged to learn for the sake of the learning itself, not for grades. He was a bright young child, and by age seven was already a prolific reader in all of his three languages. But his real love was still drawing. His second grade teacher at Saint Ann’s, Coco McCoy, remembers that he “drew a lot whenever he could and grinned when he came for more paper.”

She describes his drawings of the time as a “thought process elaborated with icons, symbols, edits and a message.”

This description could very well summarize much of his later work as a famous artist. At the time, his subjects were those typical for young boys: wars, cars (mostly dragsters), and the character Alfred E. Neuman from

14

Mad magazine. ]ean Michel claimed to have sent a picture of a gun to EBI director Edgar Hoover in third grade, with no reply.

He made some new friends at the school, and with one, Marc Prozzo, wrote and illustrated a children’s book, with simple made»up characters called Gopick, Eritz, Hair, and Yaboo. Although ]ean Michel’s first child hood ambition was to be a fireman, he soon switched to wanting to become a cartoonist. His mother, recognizing his precocious interest in art, and perhaps compensating for her lost career in fashion, signed him up as a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum. The Brooklyn Museum is famous for its wings of American furniture and design as well as its collection of art. In trips there with his mother, ]ean Michel was able to absorb a wide range of different art, enriching his experience as a young child.

The pair also explored all that the city had to offer. They wandered around the great halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with its grand classical style and enormous staircase.

They were fascinated by the Museum of Modern Art (M oMA) and its less conventional collection. At MoMA, ]ean Michel was exposed to modern styles like the fragmented depictions of Pablo Picasso’s Cubist period and the messy “drips” of jackson Pollock’s huge canvases. Years later ]ean»Michel remembered enjoying Claude Monet’s huge and thickly painted Water Lilies in the museum.” But when asked about his first strong artistic impression, he replied: “Probably seeing Guernica, it was my favorite thing when I was a kid.’’

Picasso’s Guernica was a huge somber canvas, depicting the horrific effects of the Nazi bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica, which had dared to resist the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War. It was hung in a room of its own at MoMA, surrounded by drawings and sketches that Picasso had made in preparation for it. Picasso returned to a simplified Cubist style to depict the horrors of the first saturation bombing of a civilian town. The effect was graphic and visceral. Guernica has become an international symbol of the horrors of war and of resistance to it. For a child interested in cartooning it must have been especially interesting how Picasso’s individual cartoonlike studies came together in a painting of such power.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1965.

Besides museums, his mother also broadened ]ean Michel’s edu» cation by taking him to see musicals, and the whole family would occasionally go out to see a film. In addition to his grandfather’s Latin band, ]ean Michel recalled his early musical influences as the musical West Side Story, which his mother took him to, and the haunt» ing Brazilian beat from the movie Black Orpheus. ]ean Michel never learned a musical instrument as a child; his personal obsession was always drawing, but music was still important to his life. His father remembered: “There was always music at home. I’ve always been a lover of jazz and classical music,” although ]ean Michel would not share his father’s taste in music until later.

15

Jean-Michel Basquiat Untitled (Halloween), circa 1982

Early training and mature period Basquiat’s art was fundamentally rooted in the 1970s, New York Citybased graffiti movement. In 1972, he and an artist friend, Al Diaz, started spray-painting buildings in Lower Manhattan under the nom de plume, SAMO, an acronym for “Same Old Shit”.

His big break came in 1980, when his work at the Times Square Show, showcasing young New York artists, was noticed by critics. Until then, Basquiat had little money to buy supplies, so he painted on whatever he could find—window frames, cabinet doors, and even football helmets—and used found materials to create collages that he photocopied, such as Anti-Baseball Card Product, circa 1979 (see above right [detail] and page 12). After Basquiat began to earn some money, he had access to quality art materials, but throughout his career he often chose to paint on canvases he made himself or to display Xeroxed prints of his work on wood and other natural materials, as in his Untitled, 1985. With its antiestablishment, antireligion, anti-politics credo packaged in an ultracontemporary format, SAMO soon received media attention from the counter-culture press, the Village Voice the most notable among them. When Basquiat and Diaz had a falling out, Basquiat ended the project with the terse message: SAMO IS DEAD, which appeared on the façade

17

of many SoHo art galleries and downtown buildings. After taking note of the mantra, contemporary street artist, Keith Haring, staged a mock wake for SAMO at his Club 57. Homeless and sleeping on park benches, Basquiat supported himself by panhandling, dealing drugs, and peddling hand-painted postcards and T-shirts.

Basquiat frequented the Mudd Club and Club 57-both teeming with New York City’s artistic elite. During his stint as a punk rocker, he appeared as a nightclub DJ in the Blondie music video, Rapture. After inclusion of his work in the historic, punk-art Times Square Show of June 1980, Basquiat had his first solo exhibition at the Annina Nosei Gallery, in SoHo (1982). Basquiat’s rise to wider recognition coincided with the arrival, in New York, of the German Neo-

Untitled (History of the Black People) Jean-Michel Basquiat,1983

18

Expressionist movement, which provided a congenial forum for his own street-smart, curbside expressionism. Basquiat began exhibiting regularly with artists like Julian Schnabel and David Salle, all of whom were reacting, to one or another degree, against the recent historical dominance of Conceptualism and Minimalism. NeoExpressionism marked the return of painting and the re-emergence of the human figure.

Images of the African Diaspora and classic Americana punctuated Basquiat’s work at this time, some of which was featured at the prestigious Mary Boone Gallery in solo shows in the mid 1980s (Basquiat was later represented by art dealer and gallerist Larry Gagosian in Los Angeles). Rene Ricard’s Artforum article, “The Radiant Child”, of December 1981, virtually solidified

“Since I was seventeen, I thought I might be a star.”

Jean-Michel Basquiat Basquiat’s position as a formidable figure in the greater art world. 1982 was a banner year for Basquait, as he opened six solo shows in cities worldwide and became the youngest artist ever to be included in Documenta, the international contemporary art extravaganza held every five years in Kassel, Germany. During this time, Basquiat created some 200 art works and developed a signature motif: a heroic, crowned black oracle figure. The ferocity of Basquiat’s technique, those slashes of paint and dynamic dashes of line, presumably revealed his subjects’ inner-self, their hidden feelings, and their deepest desires. In keeping with a wider Black Renaissance in the New York art world of the same era (such as with the new, widespread attention at the time being given Faith Ringgold and Jacob Lawrence), another epic figure, the West African griot, also features heavily in Basquiat’s work of the NeoExpressionist era. The griot propagated community history in West African culture through storytelling and song, and he is typically depicted by Basquiat with a grimace and squinting elliptical eyes, their gaze fixed securely on the observer.

Lomo Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1982.

By the early 1980s, Basquiat had befriended Pop artist Andy Warhol, with whom he collaborated on a series of works from 1984 to 1986, such as Ten Punching Bags (Last Supper) (198586). Warhol would often paint first, then Basquiat would layer over his work. In 1985, a New York Times Magazine feature article declared Basquiat the hot young American artist of the 1980s. At the same time, Basquiat was unfortunately becoming increasingly addicted to heroin and cocaine, which untimely led to his tragic death in 1988 at the age of 27.

19

Cabeza (1982) Jean-Michel Basquiat

the artist Collectors began buying his art, and his gallery shows quickly sold out.

His work was admired for its originality, emotional depth, use of unique symbols and imagery, and formal strengths in color, composition, and drawing. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s career spanned the late 1970s through the 1980s until his death in 1988 at age twenty-seven.

Basquiat’s art was exhibited in public for the first time in June 1980 at the Times Square Show. He played the leading role in the film New York Beat, which was first shown in 2000 under the title of Downtown 81. The art dealers Emilio Mazzoli, Bruno Bischofberger and Annina Nosei came across Basquiat’s work at the curator Diego Cortez’ exhibition New York/New Wave in February 1981, which was being held at the P.S.1 in Long Island City in Queens.

After his first solo exhibition in May at the Galleria d’Arte Emilio Mazzoli in Modena, numerous further successful exhibitions followed in 1982 in the Annina Nosei Gallery and the Fun Gallery in New York, the Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich and the Larry Gagosian Gallery in L.A., to name but a few. His works were exhibited at the Documenta 7 (1982) in Kassel as well as at the Whitney Biennial (1983) in New York and were also shown at the Galerie Beyeler (1983) in Basel. Following the initiative of Bruno Bischofberger, Basquiat worked in 1984/5 on joint projects with Francesco Clemente and Andy Warhol, and later with Andy Warhol on his own.

21

Solo exhibitions at Bruno Bischofberger’s gallery, at the Mary Boone Gallery and the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York then followed. In November 1986 a retrospective of his work was shown at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hannover.

NW YORK/ NEW WAVE In February 1981, the landmark exhibition New York/New Wave opened at P.S.1 in Long Island City. Curated by Diego Cortez, co-founder of the famous Mudd Club, the show featured over 1,600 works by more than 100 emerging and celebrated artists, musicians and writers, including Andy Warhol, Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, David Byrne and William Burroughs. Cortez wanted to convey the downtown countercultural scene of the time, capturing the sprawling energy of New and No Wave music and its reach into visual art. Basquiat was the only artist in the show to be given a prominent space for painting. Reunited for the first time in this room are 15 of the works he exhibited, which were made on canvas, paper, wood, scrap metal and foam rubber.

They depict the ominous skyscraper-laden skyline, complete with soaring planes and cartoon-style cars – his response to the noise of Manhattan life. Basquiat and Cortez placed the works at surprising heights and in unusual configurations, which has been evoked in the hang here.

New York/New Wave launched Basquiat’s career, as he quickly won the admiration of fellow artists, collectors and dealers.

22

Despite being almost entirely unknown, Basquiat was singled out and lauded by almost every critic, with Peter Schjeldahl writing in the Village Voice: ‘I would not have suspected from Samo’s generally grotty defacements of my neighbourhood the graphic and painterly talents revealed’.

SELF-PORTRAIT Basquiat was inspired by the creative possibilities of identity. The name Aaron, for example, which is written on a number of early works, could connect to the black baseball player Hank Aaron (who beat Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1974). But Basquiat may also have been referencing the black antihero of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and the brother of Moses in the Old Testament, who frees the Israelites from servitude.When asked in an interview about the figures in his paintings, Basquiat was clear that ‘a lot of them are selfportraits’, though in a number of different guises. In Untitled (1982), painted for his first solo exhibition at Annina Nosei Gallery in March 1982, a boxing figure, with fist held aloft, is depicted with a skull-like head, reminiscent of the Voodoo spirit-god Baron Samedi. These powerful, existential figures were followed by several more direct selfportraits from 1983 to 1984.

Basquiat mocked the art world’s tendency to reduce artists to their biography (date of birth, schooling, influences), but he was also self-conscious of his youth and the stereotyping of black artists. He questioned the relationship between an artist’s identity

Self Portrait, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1986 .

and their reception, probing the renewed fixation on celebrity in 1980s New York. As Rene Ricard wrote in his article on Basquiat: ‘one must become the iconic representation of oneself in this town’.

ART HISTORY Basquiat drew upon a collection of artistic heroes. While growing up in New York, he visited museums with his mother Matilde, and he remained an avid exhibition-goer.

The retrospective of the late abstract expressionist Cy Twombly at the Whitney

in 1979 had a formative influence, and he attended the controversial Primitivism in 20th Century Art in 1984 both at MoMA and when it travelled to the Dallas Museum of Art. He was also a frequent visitor to New York’s vast Metropolitan Museum, making drawings directly from its collections.

Basquiat took it upon himself to consume the mainstream ‘canon’ of western art, but he also looked beyond this conventional narrative. He owned a copy of H. W. Janson’s History of Art, as well as Burchard

23

“I don’t listen to what art critics say.

I don’t know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.”

Jean-Michel Basquiat Brentjes’ African Rock Art (1969) and Robert Farris Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1984), often taking inspiration from their pages. He had an extensive collection of artist books and catalogues that he used as source material, some of which are displayed here. Like his taste in music, Basquiat’s art historical references were eclectic, encompassing the Venus of Willendorf (an 11cm statuette believed to date from between 28,000 and 25,000 BC), African masks, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Édouard Manet, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and African American folk artists Sam Doyle and Bill Traylor. Perhaps what connects these diverse figures for Basquiat is an interest in the idea of a signature artistic style.

MUSIC Music was extremely important to Basquiat.

As a teenager, he cofounded a band called Gray that mixed ska and punk with “noise muzik.” He performed in Debbie Harry’s Rapture video and produced the record

24

“Beat Bop,” featuring the rapper K-Rob and a fellow graffiti artist, Rammellzee. Basquiat briefly dated Madonna and was also a close friend of Fab 5 Freddy (Fred Brathwaite), the hip-hop impresario and first MTV veejay.

Music also became a subject in his art. He often featured jazz musicians and singers, including Max Roach, Billie Holiday, Fats Waller, and Charlie Parker. On a page from a notebook from about 1983, Basquiat lists the titles of four albums, including two by the trumpeter and composer Miles Davis: Sketches of Spain and Kind of Blue (see above right [detail] and page 19). A list in a notebook page from four years later NOTEBOOKS Basquiat populated the pages of his notebooks with poems and word experiments, almost always writing in neat capitalised lettering, as if he intended for them to be seen. Here was a space to craft enigmatic phrases imbued with poetic rhythm, such as ‘FAMOUS NEGRO ATHELETES’ – three stark words, the last deliberately misspelt to

suggest a possible pronunciation. He used ordinary composition notebooks, with marbled black-and-white paperboard covers and blue-lined paper bound through the fold. He used these notebooks to draw and write in his own signature style. He generally left some of the pages blank and rarely used the lefthand side. The pages he did use include everything from subjects that appear in his more elaborate paintings, such as crowns and human figures, to everyday information such as lists, names, and telephone numbers. Treating words like visual elements in a composition, he freely arranged words and phrases as a designer would—balancing lines and shapes on the page—and collaging together a wide range of subjects in a single composition.

PICTURING BLACK HEROES Basquiat once said, “The black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings. I realized that I didn’t see many paintings with black people in them.”4 These individuals included jazz icons Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and celebrated athletes such as Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Muhammad Ali, and Hank Aaron.

Basquiat used crowns, calling to mind the royal titles adopted by famous African American musicians such as Duke Ellington or Count Basie, as a symbol of his reverence. In the unusual portraits he created of his heroes, Basquiat made almost no effort to paint them with recognizable facial features but sometimes featured their names as a part of the painting or title. Famous Negro Athletes, 1981, features the heads of four black men. Below the head of the third figure is a baseball.

Untitled (Charlie Parker) Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1983.

The title is written in capital letters across the bottom of the drawing. A page from a notebook from 1980–81 includes an image of the same subject, with several differences: there are three heads instead of four, famous negro atheletes is written above the figures’ heads and composite drawings below them, and a crown is placed above the figure at the right.

25

Untitled(1982) Jean-Michel Basquiat

warhol and jean Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol: ’80s cool kid and the king of Pop art. It was an unlikely pairing, but one that won the hearts of art lovers everywhere. Immortalised in Julian Schnabel’s fictionalised biopic “Basquiat” and continually revived through the photo sharing of Tumblrobsessed millennials, the friendship between Basquiat and Warhol continues to be a source of fascination. Looking at fond memories Like many artists of his generation, Basquiat greatly admired Andy Warhol. As a teenager, he treasured his copy of The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (1975). Their first encounter was in 1979, when Basquiat spied Warhol and curator Henry Geldzahler having lunch in the SoHo restaurant WPA and summoned the courage to show them his work. While Geldzahler dismissed him as ‘too young’, Warhol bought one of his postcards for a dollar.

On 4 October 1982, art dealer and collector Bruno Bischofberger took Basquiat to visit Warhol’s Factory for the first time. Basquiat rushed back to his Crosby Street studio to paint a dual portrait, Dos Cabezas, which captures a likeness of both artists: Warhol with his wild wig and Basquiat with his crown of dreadlocks. Much to Warhol’s delight, Basquiat delivered it back two hours later, still dripping with paint. In 1983, Warhol leased Basquiat an apartment at 57 Great Jones Street and, at Bischofberger’s suggestion, the pair began collaborating – first with Italian

27

Jean-Michel Basquiat & Andy Warhol, Bananas, 1985.

artist Francesco Clemente, and then alone.

In September 1985 many of these collaborations were exhibited at Tony Shafrazi Gallery. A harsh review in The New York Times dismissed Basquiat as Warhol’s ‘mascot’, demonstrating a common misconception of the pair. In fact they shared a remarkable friendship. Basquiat convinced Warhol to return to painting by hand, while he started to use the silkscreen technique for which Warhol was famous.

28

Warhol and Basquiat’s friendship was remarkably close. Looking back on Andy’s fondness for Basquiat, fellow artist Fab Five Freddy said, “Andy was really giving great advice. He would be like ‘Jean, did you do this? Have you spoke to your mom?’” Tamra Davis testified Warhol’s almost parental role in Basquiat’s life, insisting, “Andy really was there for him”.

Rumours of physical intimacy between Warhol and Basquiat have been tossed aside by friends and family. A notorious gay icon, Andy can be seen flirting with Basquiat in rare footage from the ’80s, and it’s clear the pair had a connection. Even so, Basquiat had countless girlfriends – including Madonna – during his friendship with Warhol. “Andy, like many people, was very seduced and enamoured by Jean-

“Jean was devastated, he was crying hysterically… I could just tell he was grieving and it was so bad” Fab Five Freddy Michel”, tells Basquiat’s ex-girlfriend, Suzanne Mallouk, before adding, “I think he probably had a crush on him”. Basquiat was never quite co-opted by the high-art circuit; his work was rejected by both the Whitney and MoMA. “The art was mostly minimal when I came up,” Basquiat explained, “and it sort of confused me a little bit. I thought it divided people a little bit – I thought it alienated most people from art.” In turn, Basquiat found himself alienated from the art-world esteem he so desperately wanted to be a part of. Basquiat saw his artistic collaboration with Warhol as a way to elevate himself in the art world.

Following a routine gallbladder surgery, Andy Warhol died on 22 February, 1987. The tragedy took its toll on Basquiat’s health and state of mind, consequently revealing the extent to which Warhol had been his rock. “They had a falling out and they never had a chance to repair that,” Suzanne explains, “he really went downhill after that”. “Jean was devastated, he was crying hysterically… I could just tell he was grieving and it was so bad” – Fab Five Freddy. The drug habit that Basquiat developed to cope with being thrust into fame spiralled out of control. Bruno Bischofberger laments, “Soon after that he was so much more involved with drugs… that became the centre of his life.” Basquiat’s heroin use would famously be his undoing. Despite attempting to get clean on a trip to Hawaii, he died from an overdose when he was only 27 years old.

Dos Cabezas, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1982.

29

Jean Michel Basquiat 1982 Untitled (Ernok)

LEGACY In his short and largely troubled life, Jean-Michel Basquiat nonetheless came to play an important and historic role in the rise of Punk Art and Neo-Expressionism in the New York art scene.

While the larger public latched on to the superficial exoticism of his work and were captivated by his overnight celebrity, his art, often described inaccurately as “naif” and “ethnically gritty”, held important connections to expressive precursors, such as Jean Dubuffet and Cy Twombly. A product of the hyped-up 1980s, Basquiat and his work continue to serve for many observers as a metaphor for the dangers of artistic and social excess. Like a superhero of a graphic novel, Basquiat seemed to rocket to fame and riches, and then, just as speedily, fall back to Earth, the victim of drug abuse and eventual overdose. The recipient of posthumous retrospectives at the Brooklyn Museum (2005) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1992), as well as the subject of numerous biographies and documentaries, including JeanMichel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (2010; Tamra Davis, Dir.), and Julian Schnabel’s feature film, Basquiat (1996; starring former friend David Bowie as Andy Warhol), Basquiat and his countercultural example persist. His art remains a constant source of inspiration for contemporary artists, his short, but seemingly epic life a constant source of intrigue for a global art-loving public. The legacy of Jean-Michel Basquiat will live on as long as there are historians, writers, artists, and anyone willing to revolt against the status quo in order to create a diverse and equitable society through culture and social currency. By creating art in the face of injustice, and rebelling against the same

31

Flexible Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1984.

art world that championed Minimalism, Basquiat was a true griot and iconoclast.

He expressed his Caribbean and Creole roots by making his art a part of (and not separate from) those creators who came before him. Basquiat commented on the postmodern psyche and what it meant to be a Black American in the 1980s by elevating graffiti and his style of painting into the canon of fine art. Preserving and commemorating the work and vision of the renegades who came before, like JeanMichel Basquiat, helps with coming to terms with and making sense of a complex and constantly changing world.Basquiat used crowns, calling to mind the royal titles adopted by famous African American musicians such as Duke Ellington or Count Basie, as a symbol of his reverence. In the unusual portraits he created of all his heroes, Basquiat made almost no effort to paint them with recognizable facial features but sometimes featured their names as a part of the painting or title.

32

“Since I was seventeen, I thought I might be a star,” Basquiat once told a reporter.

In 1982, at twenty-one, he was indeed a successful, wellknown artist making a living from only the sale of his successful artwork. It was also Basquiat’s most prolific year as an artist; at least two hundred of his paintings bear that date. Despite gaining fame and success as a professional artist, Basquiat may have felt some discomfort about the way the art world treated him. In a notebook from 1980–81, he writes: I’ll give 20 lbs. of oxygen for that drawing you can’t sell a human you’ve done this scratching this was not blank. Scratching on these things.

Untitled (Fallen Angel) Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1981.

“I don’t think about art while I work. I try to think about life.”

Jean-Michel Basquiat

“I want to make paintings that look as if they were made by a child.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Bird on Money Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1981.

State of the Art Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1986.

“I made the best paintings ever. I was completely reclusive, worked a lot.�

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Copyright 2010 by Eric Fretz All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fretz, Eric. ]ean—Michel Basquiat : a biography / Eric Fr etz. p. cm. — (Greenwood biographies) Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-313-38056-3 (hard copy 1 alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-313-38057-0 (ebook) 1.

Basquiat, ]ean—l\/Iichel, 1960-1988. 2. Artists—United States—Biography. 3. African American artists—Biography. 1. Title.

N6537.BZ33F74 Z010 760.09Z—dcZZ [B] ZOO9050708 ISBN: 978-0-313-38056-3 EISBN: 978-O-313-38057-O 14 13 1Z 11 10 1Z 3 4 5 This book is also available on the World Wide Web as an eBook.

Visit www.abc-clio.com for details.

Greenwood An Imprint ofABc—CLlO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 130 Cremona Drive, PO. Box 1911 Santa Barbara, California 93116-1911 This book is printed on acid—free paper@ Manufactured in the United States of America

36

Recent Titles Coretta Scott King: A Biography Laura T. Mccarty Kanye West: A Biography

Bob Schaller

Peyton Manning: A Biography Lew Freedman Miley Cyrus: A Biography Kimberly Dillon Summers Ted Turner: A Biography

Michael @’Connor

W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography Gerald Horne George Clooney: A Biography ] oni Hirsch Blackman Will Smith: A Biography

Lisa M. Iannucci

Toni Morrison: A Biography Stephanie S. Li Halle Berry: A Biography Melissa Ewey ]ohnson

Jean-Michel Basquiat emerged from the “Punk” scene in New York as a gritty, street-smart graffiti artist who successfully crossed over from his “downtown” origins to the international art gallery circuit.

In a few fast-paced years, Basquiat swiftly rose to become one of the most celebrated, and possibly most commercially exploited American “naif” painters of the widely celebrated Neo-Expressionism art movement.