A dazzling talent who died at 27

Barbican Art Gallery, Silk Street, London EC2 (020-7638 8891, www.barbican.org.uk). Until 28 January 2018

Jean-michel Basquiat was a “brilliantly promising” painter, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Born in 1960 to a Haitian-american family in New York, he was just 17 when he first came to prominence as a graffiti artist; and by the age of 20, he was the toast of the art world, collaborating with Andy Warhol and selling canvases for millions of dollars. But his career was tragically short-lived: in 1988, aged 27, he wa1s found dead from a heroin overdose. Posthumously, Basquiat’s work has been somewhat overshadowed by his personal mystique and by the huge prices his work fetches. But as this new retrospective confirms, Basquiat was a painter “so much greater than his myth”. The show – the first significant exhibition of his work in the UK – is packed with pictures that will “delight and dazzle the eye”, bringing together paintings and drawings with videos and archive material that evoke the chaotic excitement of 1980s Manhattan. It presents Basquiat as a painter of “huge imagination and curiosity” whose tumultuous artistic vision feels more “urgent” now than ever.

As a child, Basquiat had “ambitions to become a cartoonist”, said Michael Glover in The Independent. And in a sense, that was precisely what he became. His work has the “wild, unpremeditated, improvisatory” quality of spontaneous caricature, capturing the “violent, ad-libbing elasticity of the moment”. However, you won’t see much of it here. Any “art of real significance” plays second fiddle to endless displays of mundane personal ephemera, presented in a way that suggests even “the most inept scrawling on a matchbox” deserves our “reverent scrutiny”. This exhibition is little more than a “noisy hagiography”, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Basquiat was always an overrated artist, a “pretty kid from Brooklyn” who was exploited and turned into a market commodity by the “grotesque” New York art world. I came out of this exhibition angry.

The show is poorly curated, said Matthew Collings in the London Evening Standard: there’s too much about Basquiat’s life. Nevertheless, that can’t dim the brilliance of his work. Highlights include a self-portrait from 1981, a “menacing and luminous” work that presents an “instantly recognisable likeness”; and a portrait of Andy Warhol painted just hours after meeting the older artist, whose face is rendered as a “slither of pink and white”. As a painter, Basquiat undoubtedly lived up to the hype; his work is “startlingly original” and “endlessly rewarding”.