Basquiat

Last night I realized that I hadn't posted much about the Basquiat show. It just opened at MOCA -- and I hear the crowds have been massive. So here's what I wrote about it back in March.

Jean-Michel Basquiat painted like a man who had nothing to lose. His work is exuberant, frantic and urgent. It is as if he knew that heroin would kill him at age 27.

Basquiat a retrospective of the artist's work [now at MOCA], captures that rush to create without sanitizing the messiness of Basquiat's achievements. This attractive show doesn't reveal any new surprises, but are there any to be found? The last Basquiat (1960-1988) retrospective opened at the Whitney only 13 years ago and since then Basquiat has been further memorialized in a Julian Schnabel-directed biopic in 1996 and in a 1998 best-selling biography by Phoebe Hoban.

Thanks largely to those three efforts, Basquiat has entered the pop culture lexicon as a James Dean-like figure who lived fast and died young, his legend assured. Basquiat's life provided a 1980s twist on that biographical rubric, complete with the excesses that mark the decade. At the start of his career he didn't have money and lived in a cardboard box in a city park, but by the end he was buying art supplies by throwing a wad of bills down in front of a clerk and telling him to take the relevant amount. And of course, there were the drugs. When Basquiat died in 1986 of an overdose, that seemed about right.

The paintings he left behind are a testimony to creativity born not out of an master's in fine arts program or a careful consideration of line and form, but out of life and self. Essentially, Basquiat was a gifted urban folk artist who quickly assimilated self-taught lessons about art history, and was then embraced by the surging art market of the 1980s. He painted autobiography, black history and he made paintings about the music he loved. An essay in the catalogue that accompanies the show positions him as an originator of hip-hop. 

Basquiat started as a graffiti artist on the streets of New York and never lost that need-for-speed, a certain make-it-quickly-so-I-don't-get-caught. From that speed comes a centrifugal energy that holds together even the most non-sensical and spasmodic of Basquiat's paintings. I've caught myself spending five or ten minutes looking at a Basquiat painting, such as, Riddle Me This, Batman (1987), trying to figure out what it's all about, only to realize that it's a frivolously bizarre musing on drinking and superheroes.

But at his best, Basquiat's work is a frantic mix of color, line, subject matter and originality. In 1981's Untitled (Head), Basquiat's earliest great painting, a floating head dominates the painting. The outline of a head is clear, but from there Basquiat has scratched in lines and splotches of color. A series of stitches hold the head to the background, the head's nose to its forehead, the jaw to the back of the skull. The head -– perhaps Basquiat's own -– is locked into an expression that conveys both anger and determination --  but the head's eyes are downcast, almost sad. At the top of the painting, Basquiat as scratched the words "head of" and then crossed out the unreadable letters that follow those words. It's as if his own creation scared him so much that he dared not to identify it.

Other times Basquiat would turn his language toward the simplest themes that reflected the experiences of a young man growing up. In Arroz con Pollo, a man enters the painting at stage right, bringing with him a fresh-out-of-the-oven bird. A naked woman responds, offering a breast toward the man. Basquiat, was 21 when he made this painting, and with this painting he's laying out his early-adulthood understanding of the relationship between the sexes.

Basquiat was an artist in a hurry, and that mania is clear in every room of this show. When Basquiat didn't have a canvas, he'd make do with painting on whatever was nearby, a door or hunks of wood. (A young, similarly destitute Robert Rauschenberg's similar experimentation provides a parallel.) If Basquiat wanted to include words in a painting, he'd slap them into place, unconcerned with details such as spelling. And, most obviously, Basquiat's paintings are less painted than they are scratched into place.

A 1982 tribute to jazz great Charlie Parker, CPRKR demonstrates Basquiat's tendency toward first emotional response. The work is a simple scratching of letters on an canvas with oilstick. "CPRKR," says the top of the painting, followed by the details of Parker's death: "STANHOPE HOTEL APRIL SECOND NINETEEN FIFTY THREE." But Basquiat realized that his death date was incorrect, so he crossed out "THREE," and wrote under it "FIVE."

Many of Basquiat's paintings are brilliant, many others in this show would receive little attention except when an artist dies young second-rate work makes its way into thorough retrospectives. That's easily excused.

Related: Christopher Knight, Jerry Saltz, Rhapsody Radish on a Basquiat-based jazz CD, abLA finds that MOCA is hip, hip, hip.