Shadowman
SHADOWMAN, documentary, not rated, Jean Cocteau Cinema, 3.5 chiles
Richard Hambleton was a street artist who came to prominence in New York City in the 1980s. Though he is less known today than his compatriots Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, his star shone brighter even than theirs for a time — before a hard life of drug addiction led him into poverty and obscurity. But during the period when he was most active as the artist known only as Shadowman, it was likely that New Yorkers would come across his mysterious, slapdash figures splashed onto brick walls in empty lots, on sidewalks, alleys, and the sides of buildings, along with his chalk figures, inspired by the crimescene traces of bodies. (Passersby mistook some of these for actual crime scenes.) When an interviewer in the film asks him why he made them, he said, “I wanted to paint realism.” Hambleton was enigmatic, alternately referred to by friends and former girlfriends as attractive, weird, sexy, and heroic. But he had a penchant for self-destruction.
One commentator in director Oren Jacoby’s fascinating portrait of Hambleton calls what he did “beyond art” and more like drama, saying, “It came with a story attached to it.” And the artist himself, as seen in footage here, spoke about the drive to create as though it was a compulsion, as though his brain would fall apart if he didn’t get out what was locked inside of it. The tragedy of Hambleton’s story is that he accomplished a lot very quickly and rose to a level of fame for which he was unprepared. And he did it all while in the throes of heroin addiction.
The film benefits from interviews with Hambleton, who died in 2017 after years of isolation from the art world and struggles with scoliosis and a disfiguring skin cancer that he hid beneath bandages. A late-career retrospective brought some resurgence to his reputation. Hambleton was born in Vancouver. He began his crime-scene street art, which he executed in cities across the United States and Canada, in the mid-1970s. In the early 1980s, after settling permanently in New York’s Lower East Side, he began working on his spooky shadowman figures. Quickly rendered with a wide brush dipped in gallon-sized paint cans, they appeared as the works of a manic artist by daylight. But at night, the unsuspecting could easily mistake them for actual shadows or strangers lurking in the dark. Hambleton seemed intent on giving the unwary a visceral chill.
Shadowman captures the thrill of the ’80s New York art scene and the energy happening around graffiti art. As Haring and Hambleton became better known, the art market sought to get in on the act, and Hambleton ended up recreating works in the studio for sale. His works were even collected by British royalty. Basquiat appears in archival footage explaining how, in the early days of the street-art movement, it wasn’t about ambition but about the need to make art. That changed as public interest grew, and in a way, Basquiat, Haring, and Hambleton — the de facto leaders of the scene — became the exploited victims of gallerists and curators, which led to a stifling of their creative energy. Hambleton blew the money he made on drugs and was reticent to show his work — intimidated, perhaps, by his growing fame — even while he seemed to relish a role as provocateur. For a spread in Life magazine, he draped the photographer with plastic to keep the camera from getting splashed with paint, which he heaved from buckets at the canvas as though trying to douse a raging fire. In later years, Hambleton’s retreat was marked by a series of Beautiful Paintings, colorful landscapes that are stunning, even visionary. But some of the commentators suggest these works were the result of a psyche bathed in a drug-induced high.
Shadowman is a haunting, powerful film that gives a fascinating glimpse into the street-art movement in its heyday. Hambleton’s work is shown to great effect. The movie engages your senses and takes an honest approach, not shying away from the difficult subject of addiction. The artist outlived both Basquiat, who died of an overdose, and Haring, who died of AIDS, but Hambleton remained an addict most of his life. He’s a subject worthy of admiration and pity, in equal measure. He was a disturbed and troubled man. But Jacoby’s movie is also about art at its most spirited: what it takes to make it, and what it takes from you. This is, so far, the year’s best art film.
— Michael Abatemarco