Basquait: A Supernova who Lit up our Night Sky

International Mon 01-11-2010

Basquait: A Supernova who Lit up our Night Sky
By Osei G Kofi | AfricanColours.com

Germane to the contemporary art world and the big business managing it, there’s a stellar someone, dead or alive, buried among the thousands of creative spirits and who, by an arcane process, is suddenly lit up and – voila, he or she becomes the flavour of the month.

The latest such star is Jean-Michel Basquiat - gifted, meteoric, enfant terrible who fell into near oblivion after his death in 1988 at the tender age of 27.

ell into near oblivion after his death in 1988 at the tender age of 27. Michel Basquait

^{Detail - Fallen Angel | 1981}

In the past several months the New York native is everywhere – Art Basel, Frieze London, FIAC Paris – you name it. He’s on magazine covers or inside them. Fondation Beyeler, the trendsetting Renzo Piano-built gallery tucked away in the sleepy Balois village of Riehendorf on the Swiss-German border, has just closed a well-attended exhibition on Basquiat.

The Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris has a stunning retrospective that goes on till end January 2011. It has assembled most of Basquiat’s signature pieces from private and public collections worldwide: Fallen Angel (1981), Skull (1981), Grillo (1984), 6.99 (1985), and my favourites, Irony of the Negro Policeman (1981), Boy & Dog in Johnnypump (1982) and The Field Next To The Other Road (1981).

^{The-Pharynx | Courtesy of the Sindika Dokolo Collection}

Basquiat burst onto the international art scene like a radical lobbing grenades. It was in the early 1980s, and he was barely out of his teens. He took us by the scruff of the neck and yelled: “Look here - this is my art!” With his buddy Al Diaz, and later Keith Haring, they’d begun by spraying their neighbourhood with in-your-face graffiti. He had a calling card, SAMO or “SAMe Old shit,” penned on his handiworks as comment on the “banal” art he saw in the elite galleries and museums he’d frequented from an early age.

Encouraged by his Puerto Rican mother and Haitian father, Basquiat graduated from defacing urban buildings and subways to canvas, linen, cardboard and planks of wood. It wasn’t like what he was doing in his art was revolutionary new. Picasso, Dubuffet, Bacon, Twombly, Rauschenberg and many others had made career in the genre: distorted, figurative or abstract neo-expressionisms that in some versions could pass for a child’s doodling.

^{Untitled by Jean Basquait}

The difference was, while these masters were almost all classically trained and had evolved, some would say contrived, to get to where they were, Basquiat arrived at his art form the moment he started painting. More so than the old geezers he had an innate mastery, a spectacular virtuosity and depth of imagination the others lacked - barring Picasso, perhaps.

Few could so effectively juxtapose the serious and frivolous, the holy and the profane, life and death like Basquiat. He mixed voodoo and Biblical figures, the crucifix and a boxer’s clenched fist. Grimacing skeletons, Leonardo da Vinci, Charlie Parker, Mohamed Ali, violent New York cops, all featured in his canvases. He had his take on hallowed American symbols, like, Batman, General Electric and the Star Spangled Banner. The cognoscenti jostled to brand him. “The Radiant Child,” “Black Angel,” “Black Picasso” and “Voodoo Child” were some of the sobriquets.

His frenetic compositions, esthetic shocks mostly, sought no harmony and yet were harmonious in their seeming disorder. Master of the “controlled hazard,” that was Basquiat. And his colours – oh great balls of fire, some colours! The inventors of acrylic must have had Basquiat in mind.

Jersey Joe Walcott by Jean Basquait

^{Jersey Joe Walcott}

The fake mathematical formulae and pithy phrases in English, French or Latin that he scribbled on some canvases looked frivolous, but were often trenchant social or political comments: In God We Trust, Liberty, Sangre, Crown of Thorns, Corpus, Nothing To Be Gained Here, Sweet Pungent…

Basquiat loved books, and devoured Kerouac, Baldwin and Lacan. He buffed up on black history, politics, sports and music, especially jazz, which he played in a band at some point – grunge rock was more like it.

“He possessed astonishing powers of retention of facts and obscure ephemera … and was able to collect these diverse sources onto one painting surface that coalesced into a cohesive visual and intellectual statement.” That was Richard D. Marshall on Basquiat.

Success came quickly to Basquiat, too quickly. Within three years of painting full-time he was at Documenta 7, Kassel, 1981. He was twenty-one. New York’s MoMA, that citadel of modern art, opened its doors for him in 1984. It was a group exhibition and Basquiat blew the others out of the water.

He briefly dated then star-struck, yet to be material girl, Madonna Louise Ciccone. Larry Gagosian - he wasn’t this huge in the business then - represented Basquiat in California. Emilio Mazzoli gave him and exhibition in his gallery in Modena, Italy. Swiss mega art dealer Bruno Bischofberger introduced him to enthroned Pope of Pop Art, Andy Warhol, at the Factory.

^{L-R Andy Warhol, Jean Basquait and friends}

The two struck it off instantly, the older blond-wigged iconoclast and the young, dreadlocked “eat this!” artist. Uncommon at the time the two “collaborated” and co-signed a series, including General Electric (1984), Sweet Pungent (1984) and Eggs (1985).

Many years later, in 2004, Tony Shafrazi, an eminence grise of New York art dealers and one of its market movers, produced a delightful coffee table book titled “Picasso-Bacon- Basquiat.” Yep, he put Basquiat, Picasso and Bacon under the same cover. Now, howzat for a once graffiti sprayer from the hard knocks alleys of Manhattan’s Lower East Side? Almost all the works Shafrazi brought to Art Basel last June were Basquiat and Keith Haring.

Alas, the prodigy died, heroin overdose, August 1988, before reaching his prime. Like a supernova, he’d streaked across our night sky and all too quickly flamed out of view. He’d lived fast and furious, and died young and rich. Unlike the Rolling Stones, sex drugs & rock’n’roll really did him in.

Basquiat and friends were habitués of the Mudd Club in TriBeCa, and when that closed moved to other dens of iniquity downtown. Flushed with cash and drugs Basquiat consumed New York’s night life before succumbing to depression and solitude.

He produced some 1,000 canvases and over 2,000 designs and sketches during a professional life of less than a decade. He’d slashed up and destroyed many works too. The record price for his work was made at Sotheby’s in May 2007 when a 1981 untitled work fetched $14.6 million. In November 2008, Boxer, which was owned by Lars Ulrich, drummer of heavy metal band Metallica, was auctioned at Christie’s. It was snatched by anonymous telephone bidder for $13.5 million.

^{Bischofberger}

Basquiat was contemplating visiting Africa when he died. One of his paintings, Pharynx (1985), made it via a German expatriate collector. The canvas was acquired by the Dokolo family during Mobutu’s Zaire. It’s now in Luanda, Angola, in the circle of the extended First Family of His Excellency President Eduardo dos Santos. But, that, is another story.

Am I alone in, sometimes, mulling over what the art of Basquiat would look like today had he managed to tame his furies, survived and matured? He’d be 50 this year. Could he have climbed up Picasso’s cubist pedestal, and perhaps, just perhaps, knocked him off it? Ha!

Osei G. Kofi, Nana Dede-Art Africa Investment, Geneva.

Posted By: Maggie Otieno

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