Near+Afar

Basquiat Case: One man’s trash is another man’s day trip.

Art, like beauty, is within the eye of the beholder. I personally believe there’s nothing more beautiful then the one be-holding my beverage. So spending a beautiful spring day at a museum? Indoors? No, thank you. I’d rather pluck gray hair from my mustache.

And yet, my interest in art was piqued when I read about an exhibit that might be full of fakes. The temptation to live my own version of Made You Look proved too compelling. Which is how I found myself making the trek—and as anyone who has driven on I-4 during Spring Break knows, it is a trek—to visit Heroes & Monsters at the Orlando Museum of Art.

I huffed and puffed, of course, but truth be told, I was intrigued. This one tank trip (aren’t they all at nearly $5 a gallon? harumph) down memory lane was actually pretty fun for a history buff like me. My partner, Frances Hight, and I started with pre-Colombian sculpture of the ancients who once inhabited the Americas. (I’m not that old, but there are days where I feel like crumbling marble.) From there we set the dial on our flux capacitor for Europe in the 16th century and visited awhile with Rubens, Rembrandt and friends. Louis Dewis ushered us into the twentieth century through his masterful collection of landscapes. (Though I am not a huge fan of landscapes, this exhibit changed my mind. Insert teeth gnashing, for good effect.)

But the real star of the afternoon—and the one that brought a crowd of fellow day trippers into the museum on this sunny Sunday—was the exhibit of 25 pieces by artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

An artist who lived and worked on the streets of New York and California, Basquiat rose from living in a cardboard box in 1980 to becoming the darling of the art world in eight years. However 1982 was the year most art critics consider his most prolific and successful, wherein he completed the paintings on display at OMA.

Basquiat sold the entire collection of paintings for $5,000 in 1982 to Thaddeus Mumford, a successful Hollywood TV writer. Mumford promptly deposited them in his storage locker. He reportedly did not like the paintings, never brought them into his home, never told his family he even had them. As a consequence, the paintings never hung in any exhibitions (before now) and more importantly, never came under the critical eyes of art historians. They were never seen and never officially added to the existing portfolio of known Basquiat artworks.

Hence, the controversy surrounding them.

The paintings hanging in front of me are certainly unusual, not just in style, but because they are all painted on ragged pieces of scavenged cardboard; an homage, apparently, to his years of living on the street. That may explain why, when Mumford’s storage locker was auctioned off for non-payment of fees, the winning bidder saw the stack of random cardboard inside and tossed it into a dumpster. Luckily, he described his auction win during a phone call to a friend and fellow “picker” who convinced him he should give the cardboard another look.

Today, Basquiat’s paintings command stratospheric prices. In 2017, Sotheby’s auctioned one for $110.5 million, the highest price paid for an American artist at auction. The collection in Orlando is reportedly valued at a cool $200 million; quite a contrast to its original sales price. Unfortunately, to add more drama to the rags to riches story, Basquiat never really enjoyed the financial benefits of his success. He died in 1988, a victim of a voracious drug habit.

Was it Basquiat’s movie script life that drew the crowd to the museum on Sunday? Was it the chance to see a revolutionary art collection that may rank as one of the finest in the world? Or, was it simply peer presure or coercion? (garumph)

Personally, I think the chance to see 25 pieces of cardboard pulled from a dumpster, hung in a gallery, and now valued in the millions of dollars, is reason enough to take the trip.