The World of Jean-Michel Basquiat

is the kind of artist that gives one a sense of expansive possibility his paintings are flowing tapestries of figures and charge symbols cultural references and esoteric illusions like he was trying to take on the whole world his paintings were steeped in disaffection and yet the sheer exuberance of them triumphs over discontent basquiat did what all great artists have done he made something brand new and he made it look easy his individual mark is as clear as day his paintings are as recognizably bosque as as van gogh's our van gogh's he burned hot and fast creating a lifetime's work in less than a decade picking on politics pop culture racism and art history itself but few in the 1980s could have predicted just how far a star would rise in 2017 29 years after his death bosque became the highest priced american artist at auction when one of his paintings from 1982 sold for 110 million dollars putting him in the same territory as pablo picasso and renaissance masters these prices cannot simply be chalked up to art market excesses or the taste of billionaires bosque has become a cultural icon yes because he painted barefoot and armani suits and stuff thousands of dollars in his sofa cushions because he was charismatic and aloof because he was a black star in a white art world because he died young and beautiful for all these reasons bosque ascended to mythical status and pop culture but more than anything else basquiat is famous because people love looking at his paintings they're both accessible and enigmatic cynical and sincere playful and pointed his paintings are often expressions of the racism he experienced personally but they're also explorations of racial identity the legacy of racism in america and the nature of black celebrity something he understood implicitly hollywood africans was made when boskia and his two friends toxic and ram lz were in los angeles the top line reads hollywood africans 1940. the year hattie mcdaniel became the first african-american oscar winner for gone with the wind mcdaniel who played a slave and gone with the wind and whose parents were former slaves was not allowed to attend the premiere in atlanta because it was held at a whites-only theater basket places himself and his two friends in a kind of dialogue with the narrow portrayal of african americans in hollywood the writer greg tate compared basquiat to a bicultural refugee spinning betwixt in between worlds basquiat had a special affinity for jazz musicians who were early black celebrities in america and especially for charlie parker a virtuosic saxophone player who liked vasquiah struggled with drugs and died too young i think there's a lot of people that are neglected in in art i don't know if because if it's who made the paintings or what but um [Music] i don't know see i know black people never really portrayed realistically and not maybe not or not even portray i mean not even portrayed in modern art enough while black artists like jacob lawrence and carrie james marshall and many others had garnered prominent critical success within the art establishment basquiat was unique in the sheer level of fame he achieved this was something new a star black artist making images of the black experience and class struggle that reached a huge audience from impressionable students to celebrities and wealthy elites yet even with fame and money basket dealt with pervasive racism his friend fab five freddy said that being black he was always an outsider even after flying on the concorde he wouldn't be able to get a cab something typically not experienced by rich and famous artists and boscio was painfully aware of the disconnect between the active painting and dollars in the art market aware of his novelty in the art world notoriously wearing african chieftain outfits to the parties of rich art collectors this alienation is found throughout his work vasquez able to tell his personal story and to find a generation of american painting those who knew him described an artist with peter natural creative powers and boundless energy who was driven by an insatiable desire to be famous he achieved cult status in his early twenties and was bought by collectors and celebrities quickly making him a millionaire his work was shown all over the world the major museums did not buy his artwork during his lifetime the art collectors lenoir and herbert shore offered to donate basquiat artwork to the museum of modern art in the 1980s but the museum declined the offer the shores said that many other museums including the whitney refused free basquiat paintings when the artist was still alive and so even though basquiat strove to be accepted by the institutions of the art world he harbored open contempt for them even today it can be very difficult to see a bosque painting in a new york city museum most of his paintings remain locked up in private collections museums unfortunately did not buy his paintings when they were relatively affordable from 1983 to 1988 bosque worked and lived out of a loft on great jones street in the bowery that he rented from andy warhol who was a close friend and artistic collaborator the living quarters were upstairs and the studio was downstairs the loft which was built in the 19th century originally housed horse-drawn carriages and was purchased by andy warhol's film company in the 1970s the art critic peter sheldahl visited the loft in 1985 he said the dimly lighted place was a sort of busy womb with a steady traffic of assistance and hangers on an attentive girlfriend phones ringing incessantly in a table piled with mediterranean delicacies and bottles of costly bordeaux just a few years later bosque would be found upstairs stretched out on the floor and unresponsive from a heroin overdose he was taken to kirbini medical center and pronounced dead on arrival at 27. the bowery is the oldest thoroughfare in manhattan and one of the most storied neighborhoods in new york city a place that teddy roosevelt described as hell on earth in 1913. the bowery was still pretty rough in the 1980s in a far cry from the tourist friendly place it is today the city as a whole was far more dangerous than today large areas were burned out and in ruins unpoliced and abandoned but it was still the center of the art world and seething with young artists and opportunity jamaica was born in brooklyn new york to a haitian father and puerto rican mother his mother was instrumental in his early art education encouraging his creative talent and taking him to places like the brooklyn museum and the museum of modern art he learned by looking and had access to the vast art collections new york city had to offer he remarked i'd say my mother gave me all the primary things the art came from her when jean michelle was seven his parents separated his father took custody of jean-michel and his two sisters his mother was committed to a psychiatric hospital a few years later jean-michel said my mother went crazy as a result of a bad marriage to my father gerard who was a straight-laced accountant had a difficult relationship with his only son and seemed to struggle to understand him he said of jean-michel he was like no other kid he was always so bright absolutely an unbelievable mind a genius a kid that bright thinks for some reason he's above the school system and teachers and rebels against it he wanted to paint and draw all night he got thrown out of schools jam michelle couldn't be disciplined he gave me a lot of trouble he went from a sweet trusting boy to someone who was very very guarded and moody bordering on hostile in 1975 when he was 15 john michelle ran away from home he told filmmaker tamara davis i was smoking pot in my room and my father came in and stabbed me in the ass with a knife i thought i'd better go before he killed me you know according to biographer phoebe hoban he told his friend al diaz at the time that his dad stabbed him after catching him having sex with his male cousin when john michelle ran away he spent time at a boy's home lived with a jewish hippie family then ended up in washington square park where he quote drank wine with winos and just sat there dropping acid for 8 months gerard eventually found john michelle but he could not reign his son in he skipped class took a lot of drugs and had reportedly contracted syphilis working as a prostitute in times square before his 16th birthday during this time basket developed a kind of alter-ego pseudonym called samo with his friend al diaz the pseudonym was used to author mysterious poetic sayings all over manhattan and strategically placed near art galleries where the art world might take notice he said of the moniker we were smoking some grass one night and i said something about as being the same old same all right imagine this selling packs of samo it started like that as a private joke and then it grew basically expanded the mythology of samo in a high school essay about a man seeking spiritual enlightenment bosque wrote samo was all all is samo same of the guilt-free religion and beyond basquiat and diaz would elevate samo into a kind of experimental art project the mystery of samo started buzzing around town in 1978 at age 17 the cryptic tags got bosque a write-up in the village voice and an interview on the public access show tv party in 1979 boskia met other artists by way of samo like kenny scharf and keith herring whom basket will become good friends with this was a time when graffiti art was having its cultural heyday and so this helped create a path for basquiat to enter the art world as a kind of underground street artist and poet graffiti and tagging in the 70s and 80s was all about getting your name out there about the prestige which made it a perfect vehicle for basquiat but he never considered himself a graffiti artist while he was friends with graffiti writers he said he wasn't really part of the culture and basket felt his association with graffiti pigeonholed him but the association stuck partly because bosque had cultivated a kind of down and out disenfranchised kid of the streets persona the director vincent gallo was shocked to meet basquiat's father with a tennis racket and wearing a business suit moboski was a teen runaway and left home at 17. he had been raised middle class and had gone to private school his parents were cultured and upwardly mobile but it's also true that the same old graffiti was more like conceptual art with phrases like same over the so-called avant-garde than a stylized graffiti writing found on subway cars in the late 70s and of course there are all kinds of prejudices against graffiti like the idea that it's low art or outsider art but graffiti is just one of the many lenses through which to view basquiat it's equally appropriate to think about basquia in relation to a german expressionist like ernst kirkner who pushed color and form to reflect his anxieties about the modern world or compare them to data artists who use collage and wordplay to cynically critique mainstream cultural values or to the complexity and improvisation of bebop or to william burrows in the beat generation [Music] his influences went well beyond graffiti everyone who knew basquiat described an omnivorous human being who consumed everything around him jazz classical music hip-hop mark twain the notebooks of leonardo da vinci bosque was attracted to men and women acted in movies and played in an experimental noise band called grey named after possibly the single most well-known influence on him grey's anatomy the medical book was given to him by his mother after he was hit by a car at age seven and was laid up in the hospital with internal injuries it required the removal of his spleen a big clue as to why his figures looked dissected and exposed bosque came from a multicultural background his father was a first generation haitian immigrant and his mother was puerto rican the family spoke english spanish and french at home basquiat spent two years in puerto rico as a child and by his early 20s had traveled the world was friends with andy warhol and had dated madonna he even produced the experimental 1983 hip-hop song beat pop and of course made the album art for it no wonder he didn't want to be known simply as a graffiti artist by the 1980s all the rules of academic painting had been shattered traditional aesthetic values were upended there were no conceptual limits to what art could be in painting in particular figurative art found new life in a movement term neo-expressionism led by artists like julian schnabel the 80s art market was injected with vast sums of money from american european and japanese collectors savvy dealers engineered rapid success for young artists and basquiat positioned himself right at the center of it all basquiat's success was no fluke his friend glenn o'brien wrote that basquiat saw art as a battle filled with contenders and with champions like picasso and warhol emerging on top he wasn't in it for the money he was in it for the audience he was a painter but he was also a rock star he wanted to blow minds the way that miles davis and john coltrane and jimi hendrix did he wanted to take on picasso's african mask inspired visions and blast them with the blues the references found in basquiat paintings are incredibly diverse astronomy roman history the 1936 nazi olympics go go through what what's this based on a drawing that was the first drawing of the moon by galileo and what what's this it's a copyright so in case i won't get sued for using the word pluto about walt disney my wall doesn't he once said that originally i wanted to copy the whole history down but it was too tedious so i just stuck to the cast of characters and boskia's symbols often repeat throughout his works soap for whitewashing cotton for slavery crowns for a kind of royalty a way to honor his heroes and subvert traditional symbols of power to recognize hard-won success the poet renee ricard wrote of basquiat his way of making a point without overstating the case using one or two words gets the viewer going in the direction he wants but even when there's a pointed message the paintings can remain ciphers they can be explored but not necessarily explained his paintings can be composed of dense clusters of words and charged symbols or be composed of figures floating in abstract space paintings often look like drawings bosque used oil sticks extensively to sketch out figures and brushes to fill in or erase we see self-portraits comic book characters and lots of boxing paintings basquiat venerated boxers like joe louis and muhammad ali bhaskar's father gerard was a boxing fan and watched fights on tv when john michelle was a kid in his untitled 1982 painting we see a boxer that looks triumphant but also looks exposed and brutalized with a head like a skull and gas mask combined capped with a halo saintly and burdened was certainly an original painter and had an innate sense of pictorial space color rhythm and everything else that goes into creating compelling visual art he owes a debt to the painters who came before him to the genre-bending work of robert rauschenberg to clifford still in his expansive color fields to matisse and picasso to willem de kooning who went to battle with his canvases adding and scraping away layers similar to boscia's techniques of erasing covering up and crossing out bosque said in a 1983 interview that most of his paintings have one or two paintings under them he said i'm worried that in the future parts might fall off and some of the heads underneath might show through i have a painting where someone's holding a chicken and underneath the chicken in somebody's head bosque openly acknowledged the influence of saitswambly an expressionist painter who was trained as a cryptographer by the us army swamili married cryptic writing abstraction infiguration in his messy but elegant canvases and like the drip paintings of jackson pollock boskia borrowed the instinctive approach of 1950s action painting the romanticism of direct self-expression and paint exploring the self and the unknown letting the hand lead the brain so to speak and the words in bosque paintings don't always have to denote literal meaning but can be the result of a stream of consciousness they can contain multiple meanings the paintings of basquiat give us a glimpse into his world view his interests and anxieties his anger and contempt and psychological burdens though often resist a simple or singular reading but the painting basquiat made in response to the brutal death of a black artist named michael stewart represents basquiat's feelings laid bare michael stewart was a 25 year old artist and model attending pratt a brooklyn-based art school he was arrested in september of 1983 for graffitiing in the new york subway at the first avenue station he was choked and brutally beaten by half dozen police officers students at the nearby parsons school of design reported hearing screams from their dorm rooms including musician rob zombie who was an eyewitness and testified with other students before a grand jury stuart died after spending 13 days in a coma basquiat felt it could have easily been him and it hit close to home as stewart was dating basquiat's ex-girlfriend suzanne malok at the time michael was not this sort of graffiti artist i mean he didn't paint trains or do big murals like this he just once in a while left his tag on a wall and michael was not from the ghetto and he was not a criminal or a tough guy he didn't even know how to fight you know he wasn't from the street he was just doing graffiti because it was so popular in the art world and he really had ambitions to make it as an artist bosque has spontaneously made his painting of michael stewart directly on the wall of keith haring's studio the painting may have been based on the widely seen protest poster by david wonorovich the version by bosque depicts stewart as a black faceless apparition the painting functions both as art and as a kind of historical document herring pointed out that he had been arrested four times for the same offense without incident when herring moved out of the studio he cut out the painting framed it and hung it over his bed herring kept the painting until his untimely death in 1990 a year and a half after the death of basquiat many of the best known works by bosya were made in the early 80s a time considered by many critics to be his artistic peak and a time when as critic peter sheldon put it drugs drink sex and bad behavior briefly fueled his genius before devastating it in 1982 bosque painted the haunting and cynical prophet 1. in this painting we see so many of his signature elements a ghostly skeletal figure floating in the void the figure holds his hands up in a shamanistic pose with a glowing halo that resembles christ's crown of thorns surrounding the figure we see cryptic notation and scribbles that float in empty space like saitwombly's impossible ciphers the title prophet is a clear double entendre suggestive of both a spiritual prophet and selling out we see a figure with multiple possibilities a shaman a crucified man a self-portrait a self-aware use of african tropes and there's something ominous about the painting the gestural brushwork makes the figure look like they're made out of flames glowing in the darkness the pose works in so many ways it can be haunting or heroic the figure might be lunging forward or recoiling in horror the figure might represent a spiritual healer or a tragic martyr maybe it even works like edward monk's ghostly self-portrait in which he depicts himself as a figure distorted by the world by the scream of nature as he put it when someone does something brand new like basquiat it's usually difficult to explain critics will want to immediately categorize it and assess its quality and value they might even have to put their reputations on the line is this the next big thing or just a flash in the pan one of the most prominent critics of the era robert hughes saw is completely overrated and predicted the future embarrassment of all the art dealers and collectors who were caught up in the hype of the 80s art market critics are entitled to their values and opinions but there seems to have been a failure of imagination the art of basquiat didn't fit into any existing box but critics getting things wrong is nothing new this is in some ways the story of art in the modern era manet was rejected from the paris salon of 1863. monet was ridiculed a few years later and it happens in other arts as well consider that pauline kale and many other prominent film critics pan stanley kubrick's 2001 a space odyssey a film that is now considered to be one of the greatest and most influential films ever made great art is usually divisive some argue it should be 35 years after his death bosque is recognized by most in the art world as defining a generation of american painters that mixed genres with energy and exuberance who helped return the human figure and the human mark to prominence and became celebrities doing it in august of 1988 bosque had planned to travel to abajan ivory coast where he had shown artwork a few years earlier he was supposed to go with his friend and native ivorian atara watts local shamans were set to perform a ritual cleansing ceremony that might cure him of his drug addiction bosque overdosed on heroin on august 12 and never made it to abhijan according to watts when the shamans were told basia had died they did a ceremony for the dead he said it takes place at night and involves an animal sacrifice it's related to voodoo they wore masks and prayed and did mystic dances around the fire all night long today there's a plaque on the front of the building at 57 great jones street that recognizes the impact of bosque the building at times has looked like a graffiti shrine according to phoebe hoban's baskia a quick killing in art when basquiat died christie's was tasked with appraising the contents of the great jones street loft the inventory was filled with finished and unfinished paintings other artists work including several dozen warhols and a piece by william burrows a closet full of armani and calm de garcon suits a thousand videotapes african instruments and a carton of the charlie parker biography bird lives he also left behind 917 drawings and 171 paintings basquia's works collectively can feel like a search for meaning in the chaos of the postmodern mass media age which makes his art feel even more relevant in today's kaleidoscopic digital age one of the things that people love about basquiat paintings is how human they are his paintings and drawings make us feel something we can see the way they're made the rhythms and textures pulsate we can see the hand at work at times raw and spontaneous other times subtle and exacting vasquez spent months on this untitled work the painting has a kind of quiet energy to it the head is exposed prickly and brooding both a self-portrait and like all art a thing unto itself [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: The Conspiracy of Art

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Keywords: Jean-Michel Basquiat, neo-expressionism, expressionism, 1980's, 80's, julian schnabel, figurative art, basquiat painting, profit i, Basquiat biography, Basquiat life, Basquiat bio, Basquiat art

Id: vX_4bBTBctc

Length: 25min 33sec (1533 seconds)

Published: Fri May 27 2022