Believe the hype
Basquiat at the Barbican
Jean-michel Basquiat’s short life reads like a kind of Rake’s Progress of Eighties’ New York: from teenage graffiti artist to art world superstar to heroin-induced death aged 27, all in under a decade. But Basquiat has become much more than an icon of monetarist-era excess.
Thirty years on from his tragic demise, his status as one of the key artists of our age appears to be actually rising – particularly among the young – a position reflected in extraordinary prices; the $110.5million (£85million) achieved earlier this year for Untitled (1982) is the highest price ever paid for an American artist at auction.
But how much of Basquiat’s appeal lies in his paintings, and how much in his image: the dreadlocked young Brooklynite rubbing shoulders with Madonna and Andy Warhol.
This show – incredibly, Basquiat’s first major British survey – begins from the preposterous premise that he was “one of the most significant artists of the 20th century”. And while it aims to look behind the myth, it hits us with so much of that myth that it’s hard, at first, to actually see the work. Never a full-blown graffiti artist in the traintagging sense, Basquiat made his name with cryptic poetic statements sprayed around the city. From the age of 19, he was continually filmed and photographed. We see Basquiat in huge projections, in fading newspapers, wobbly underground videos and in portraits with his hero, Warhol, with whom he made a number of works.
The paintings, drawings and collaborative bits and pieces used to illustrate this part of the show are an intriguing jumble of juvenile bric-abrac: a graffiti-covered fridge, large pieces of quite interesting graffiti and a not-very-good joint portrait with Warhol. But the only work in this section to give a real sense of Basquiat’s value as a painter is another Untitled (1982): an image of a boxer with what looks like a gas mask for a head. It appears scrawled, but bursts with tension and energy.
On the lower floor, we get to look at a critical mass of Basquiat’s paintings, focusing on his obsessions with music and art history, and revealing him as an inveterate maker of lists. The rough-hewn cool of Self-portrait (1981), comprising his dreadlocked silhouette plus the scribbled track listing from a Thelonious Monk album, has an effortless cool that immediately explains Basquiat’s appeal to the young.
As he began cannibalising the art books littered around his studio, from Gray’s Anatomy to Leonardo, his paintings became surrogate pin boards: photocopies of his own drawings merge with lists of whatever was running through his head. Apparently random classical references merge with Afro-american history and cartoon monsters in Jawbone of an Ass. Glenn is overlain with a huge Afro-graffiti head, which suggests anger and frustration but doesn’t quite transcend the crude adolescent gesture.
The paintings in the final room come together in an exhilarating flow of ideas that makes all the contextual mythmaking – intriguing though it is – feel superfluous. But if the man certainly had it, this feels like the beginning of a career rather than the climax.
Poor old Basquiat never proceeded beyond the prodigy stage. But a prodigy, in the fullest sense, he certainly was.