CLEVELAND, Ohio – Jean-Michel Basquiat, the graffiti artist who became a star of the New York art world shy of four decades ago, has been revered and endlessly exhibited since his death in 1988 at age 27 from a drug overdose.
Today his works sell at auction for prices in the tens of millions, astronomical sums for an untrained artist who, with his friend Al Diaz, started spraying the tag “SAMO(c)” (short for “Same Old S—“) on city buildings in the late 1970s.
An essay by scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. in the catalog of an absorbing new show at the Cleveland Museum of Art points out that Basquiat was “both one of the most significant American visual artists of the 1980s and one of the most important black visual artists of all time.”
Basquiat commands all that attention because his art combined an almost philosophical density of meaning while remaining utterly authentic and almost unimpressed with the fame Basquiat began to gather around himself in his brief career.
As the artist himself once said in a widely quoted remark: “I wanted to be a star, not a gallery mascot.”
A key quality
Basquiat’s work has numerous deeply engaging qualities, but if there’s one essential power that’s both obvious and rarely remarked upon, at least in this exhibition, it’s his sense of touch.
Some artists have the ability to make every single mark made on a piece of paper or a patch of canvas telegraph a kind of vital energy as an individual unit of a larger whole.
Basquiat had that rare quality.
Review Whats up: “Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks.”
Venue: Cleveland Museum of Art.
Where: 11150 East Blvd., Cleveland.
When: Now through Sunday, April 23.
Admission: $10, adults. Call 216-421-7340 or go to clevelandart.org.
When he scribbled, or sketched, or ran a loaded brush across canvas, Basquiat had an uncanny ability to impart a crisp, controlled, percussive energy that feels almost electric. It’s the ultimate artistic alchemy, turning office supplies and everyday art materials into magic.
That quality permeates the entire show, giving vibrant life to all the other elements of Basquiat’s art, including the words he chose, how he deployed them, and how they fit into the paintings, prints and drawings in the show that provide context.
Organized for the Brooklyn Museum of Art by Austrian art critic Dieter Buchhart and Tricia Laughlin Bloom, curator of American art at the Newark Museum, the Cleveland exhibition focuses on Basquiat’s pages from a half-dozen “Unknown Notebooks,” which in reality are rarely exhibited and little known, rather than recently discovered.
Capturing a city
On his pages, Basquiat wrote cascades of words that channeled his reactions to New York’s scruffy energy in the years immediately after its near-default in 1975, when then-President Gerald Ford famously refused a federal bailout, producing the immortal Daily News headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead.”
One page from Notebook 5, made around 1987, conveys the sense of walking a city street with the words “NEON SHOE REPAIR,” drawn in black crayon, accompanied by “LOTTERY / CANDY / MAGAZINES / CIGARS (c),” and then, “ARAB SINGING.”
Reading this is almost like walking alongside Basquiat, seeing what he’s seeing, scanning neon signs on Canal Street or the Bowery in Lower Manhattan.
The city at the time was a national symbol of urban dysfunction, with graffiti-covered subway cars and crime in the South Bronx that inspired the film “Fort Apache.” But it also produced a cultural milieu that included Andy Warhol, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe and Lou Reed.
Born in Brooklyn in 1960 as the son of a Haitian-American father and a Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat felt stifled at home and tried to run away to Greenwich Village in Manhattan at age 15, as Gates writes in the catalog. He left for good at 18 before finishing high school.
Within the single decade that followed, Basquiat became a central figure in the scene that gathered around Warhol’s Factory; and, from 1978 to 1988, he produced a body of work that includes 600 paintings and 1,500 drawings.
Seeing and reading Basquiat’s page is an exercise that’s literary and artistic, verbal and visual.
Basquiat can be powerfully terse in statements that have a ring of universal truth, as in the page from the same notebook on which he wrote his characteristic block letters in blue crayon: “LOVE IS A LIE / LOVER = LIAR.”
Or he can be literary, as in notebook pages covered with words and phrases culled from “Moby-Dick” that zoom in on verbal fragments with a sense of joy and discovery.
What makes it art
But while the show makes the very clear point that words are central to Basquiat’s art, it also demonstrates he was very much more than simply a writer.
His work is art in part because he used words both as multilevel conveyors of linguistic and cultural meaning and as visual forms with their own power.
Basquiat heightened that power by making compositions out of words, by crossing out certain words or letters to heighten awareness of them, or by painting or drawing them on blank backgrounds to elevate their meaning and visual impact.
And always, Basquiat’s tactile engagement with his materials is a central, powerful force.
Looking at his art, you almost sense his presence, and it comes not only through his combination of street argot and high-culture commentary, but also through physical contact with his materials.
One example is “Ideal,” from 1988, a canvas that consists of a brushy field of pale lemon-colored acrylic paint with the world “IDEAL,” drawn in black oilstick letters and surrounded by two ovoid lines that frame the word.
The painting is a takeoff on the logo of the Ideal toy company that partially liberates the word from its commercial context to reveal its true meaning, while still keeping it tethered in the world of consumerism.
It also carries a charge thanks to the way Basquiat shaped the individual letters in hard black lines that nonetheless have a nervous, fluttery softness at the edges that impart movement and vitality.
Even if you come to the show knowing nothing about New York at the time or Basquiat’s ability to convey complex thoughts about race, love, music, literature or the Lower Manhattan scene, his sense of touch is one important point of entry among many. And it’s one of the major reasons why his art endures.
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