New Yorkers don’t have to choose between two simultaneous exhibitions of work by Jean-Michel Basquiat every day. “King Pleasure,” an immersive experience designed by the architect David Adjaye and curated by the artist’s sisters Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, includes a recreation of Jean-Michel’s nursery and his studio and costs $35 admission. ‘Art and Objecthood’, curated by art historian Dieter Buchhart of Nahmad Contemporary, collects an extraordinary treasure of paintings Basquiat created on doors, windows and a refrigerator.
While “King Pleasure” also includes some never-before-seen pieces, the emphasis is clearly on the artist’s life, so I’ve focused on the Nahmad show, whose sparse staging gives you a better chance of interacting with the work. to go yourself. But you should keep in mind his biographical basis.
Young and ambitious, Basquiat shot straight to the center of the New York art scene when he was barely out of his teens, exhibiting with some of the country’s most influential gallery owners, hitting nightclubs with Andy Warhol and producing a staggering amount of artwork. died of a heroin overdose, at the age of 27, in 1988. In 2017, one of his paintings sold for more than $110 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by an American artist.
He was also the Brooklyn-born son of a Haitian father and a Boricua mother, and although his family was not poor, he spent a few lean years alone before starting to sell work. When he reached the artistic apex, he was one of the few black faces out there – and issues of race and class, complicated by his own extreme experience, are all over his work.
materials
Like most artists, Basquiat drew as a child, copying famous anatomical drawings from “Gray’s Anatomy† while recovering from a car accident. However, his first real foray into the adult art world was through the graffiti tag SAMO, which he and his high school friend Al Diaz placed around SoHo and the School of Visual Arts. Before moving on to canvas, Basquiat used ‘found materials’ such as discarded cardboard and paper or construction waste. In part, this was born of necessity – canvas costs money, while in the 1970s, smashed windows were up for grabs in mid-70s Manhattan.
But Basquiat’s use of found materials was also, as the painted windows, doors and sections of wooden fencing in ‘Art and Objecthood’ make clear, a daring artistic strategy that reverberated through even his more conventional endeavours. Unlike the readymades, the manufactured goods that Marcel Duchamp exhibited as art in the early years of the 20th century, Basquiat’s found objects are not exactly sculpture. They are surfaces on which he can paint. But because they are also recognizable objects in themselves, they have a seductive ambiguity. You can’t quite see “Untitled (Refrigerator)” (1981) as alone a device, or just a surface to draw on – the longer you look, the more it seems to waver between the two categories. And once you’re ready for that kind of ambiguity, you start to see it everywhere. In another context, “Multiflavors” (1982), a royal blue canvas on exposed wooden stretchers, might look just like a painting. Here it is also a very peculiar object.
Iconography
Basquiat didn’t spend much time writing graffiti, but he used its techniques throughout his career. The graffiti writer’s pared-down repertoire of easily recognizable characters can be just as effective on a gallery wall as it is on the side of a building, and one of his favorites – a simple, icon-like crown – appears on the first piece in “Art and Objecthood.” , a white wood cabinet door titled “Minor Success” (1980). Below that is a face without facial features and a cartoonish sports car.
“If you ask 10 people” about the crown, says Buchhart, the curator, “they will tell you 10 different meanings.” He further cites Basquiat’s oft-quoted comment that his artistic subjects—musicians, athletes, artists—were “kingdom, heroism, and the streets,” and the way the crown serves to highlight images or works particularly special to the artist.
In essence, though, the crown claims a figurative royal mantle for the artist himself, for the figure he portrays, or both – Basquiat’s faces and bodies often read at least partially like self-portraits. But it’s more nuanced than that, especially since it’s being wielded by a young black performer who wants to make himself a celebrity. One has to wonder in what social context he had to make such stark claims of dignity. Is it one in which black faces struggle to be recognized as individuals? Or one where status comes from owning material objects such as a nice car?
writing/drawing
Another aspect of graffiti that Basquiat captured was the use of writing for visual effect. In many earlier collages and works on paper, a flood of capital letters fills every available square inch. But you can’t read from start to finish and expect an argument. Instead, you get a cloud of loose associations that are more like a photograph, in the way you read it, than plain prose or even poetry.
This quality is enhanced by the way Basquiat mixes drawing and writing. If you look back at “Multiflavours”, you’ll see that it has a three-pointed yellow crown in the center and a cloud of red and yellow circles on one side, and that it has white, yellow, and pink writing, arranged over blocks of black and blue. , forms a striking composition. As you read it, you’ll find a group of what appear to be references to advertisements or restaurant signs, phrases like “cheap eats” and “HACKED CHICKEN WITH MULTIFLAVORS.” You can’t say for sure whether it’s satire or poetry, angry or effusive or funny. But it could be almost all of them.
Composition
One thing that is particularly easier to see in “Art and Objecthood” than in the overwhelming visual cacophony of “King Pleasure” is how conservatively Basquiat organized the elements of his paintings. The sheer abundance of markings can be misleading, but if you recognize the scratches and scribbles of, say, ‘Minor Success’ as a texture rather than so many pieces of individual information, you’ll see that the arrangement of the crown, face, and car cannot be simpler. A stocky little fridge is adorned with a burst of letters and a face in “Untitled (Refrigerator)”, but they stop just before the handle, allowing the mostly empty bottom portion to balance their effect. And even if each mark really carries the same weight, as with an intricately painted yellow door, Basquiat carefully controls the shape and color to create an overall effect of harmony and stability that balances the frenzied energy of his lines.
Line
Perhaps the most stunning piece in “Art and Objecthood” is an untitled painting from 1982 – the year the artist himself claimed to have “created the best paintings ever.” Done in acrylic and enamel on a packing blanket mounted on exposed wooden stretchers, it shows a black face with white features and a blood red skull marked with small black stripes like watermelon seeds.
It’s a searing portrait of the psychological toll of racism: even when slander and insulting tropes leave him gory and naked, the figure wears a “white” expression to interact with one another. It’s another stately composition, balancing a dense figure on one side with empty space on the other, underlining both to provide emphasis. And it’s just as good a place to study what is perhaps the most distinguishing feature of Basquiat’s work: his line.
The line describing this skull shivers like someone naked in a snow storm. It makes a fracture in the jaw, uneven eyebrows, a bulge on the crown of the skull. It leaves nothing unclear; the drawing is as easy to read as a geometric diagram. But this shakiness does pass on additional information. It gives the figure a certain kind of intensity, making the eyes squint and the teeth grit, and it gives a similar intensity to the artwork as a whole, evoking the tension and energy that went into creating it. At the same time, it gives you a more vivid picture than any biography, of the personality of the man who drew it: manic and melancholic, electric, glowing.
Jean-Michel Basquiat: art and objectivity
Through June 11, Nahmad Contemporary, 980 Madison Avenue, third floor, 646-449-9118; nahmadcontemporary.com.
