Caribbean Beat — November/December 2017 (#148)

word of mouth
Dispatches from our correspondents around the Caribbean and further afield
The
Basquiat
boom
Philip Sander takes in an actionpacked
exhibition of the artist
Jean-Michael Basquiat, the son of
a Haitian immigrant who became
the most celebrated American
artist of his time
Earlier this year, when a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat
sold at auction for US$110.5 million in New York, it didn’t
just set a record for the late artist — it was the highest
auction price ever paid for an artwork by any American. It was
also just another superlative in the meteoric posthumous career
of one of the defining creative talents of the 1980s.
Born in Brooklyn in 1960 to a Haitian father and Puerto
Rican–American mother, Basquiat grew up trilingual, speaking
English, French, and Spanish, in close contact with New York’s
swelling Caribbean communities. His artistic talent was obvious
early on, nurtured by his doting mother, who took him to the
city’s many museums, signed him up for art classes, and bought
him books including a prized copy of Gray’s Anatomy, whose
illustrations would influence Basquiat’s later work.
But, despite the teenage Jean-Michel’s obvious intelligence
and love of reading, family troubles — and his mother’s mental
illness — derailed his academic career. He dropped out of school
more than once, ran away from home at age fifteen, and became
estranged from his father. At sixteen, he was supporting himself,
just barely, by selling handmade postcards and t-shirts.
He was also already earning the attention of NYC’s cuttingedge
art world, for the distinctive poem-like graffiti he and a
friend left on downtown walls in the dead of night — signed with
their pseudonym SAMO, short for “same old.” When the Village
Voice newspaper finally tracked down the authors of the witty
spray-painted lines, it was the beginning of a dizzyingly rapid
rise in acclaim. Within a few years, Basquiat was signed to a
major commercial gallery, his paintings were selling for prices in
five figures, and he was one of the hottest and most controversial
young artists in a reviving art scene — and a rare example of a
black artist achieving genuine cultural celebrity. It was a brilliant
but brief trajectory: in 1988, Basquiat died of a heroin overdose
at the age of twenty-seven.
But the story was hardly over. A 1992 retrospective at the
Whitney Museum sealed Basquiat’s reputation, and in the
decades since, an avalanche of shows, books, and documentaries
have built interest in his paintings — and their prices — to
astronomical heights.
It’s astonishing, then, that Basquiat: Boom for Real — the survey
exhibition that opened in September at London’s Barbican Art
Gallery, and runs until 28 January, 2018 — is his first major posthumous
show in the UK, heralded with near-universal excitement
among British art fans. Assembling more than a hundred works
with copious selections from the Basquiat archives — notebooks,
letters, video and sound recordings, paint-flecked books from the
artist’s personal library, and even a fridge he once covered with
magic-marker drawings — Boom for Real sets out to document
his full aesthetic range and intellectual preoccupations, while
situating Basquiat in the downtown NYC scene of the early 1980s,
where he befriended icons as diverse as Andy Warhol, Madonna,
and the Jamaican-descended early rapper Fab 5 Freddy.
The sensory force of all these objects is almost overwhelming,
but curators Dieter Buchhart and Eleanor Nairne have
devised an orderly narrative through the Barbican’s two floors
of galleries, following both biographical and thematic chronology.
In one room they offer a partial recreation of Basquiat’s
first exhibition, bringing together early works that grabbed
the attention of New York art critics in 1981. Other rooms are
devoted to SAMO’s graffiti, to Basquiat’s friendship and creative
collaborations with Warhol — including a painting they made
together — and his intersections with downtown musicians and
filmmakers (here you can watch the full seventy-two minutes of
Downtown 81, otherwise known as New York Beat, with Basquiat
in a self-referential starring role).
The show also traces Basquiat’s fascination with jazz, with
African American heroes (like the boxer Jack Johnson) and art
historical figures (see his portrait of Pablo Picasso), and his devotion
to books, which constantly surrounded him in his studio.
Almost as breathtaking as the large-scale paintings with their
bold fields of colour and repeated iconography are the pages
26 WWW.CARIBBEAN-BEAT.COM