BROTHERS IN ARTS
Two stars of New York’s 1980s art scene, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring are the subject of a new joint exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria.
Two stars of New York’s 1980s art scene, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring came to define a time and energy, despite both their lives being tragically cut short. As the National Gallery of Victoria prepares to unveil the pair’s first joint exhibition, their relevance is as strong as ever. By Jessica Montague.
ON A SMALL street just off the Bowery in New York City’s historic NoHo neighbourhood, a low-standing building the shade of dirty milk sits squashed between two apartment blocks. Inside operates an emporium of rustic Italian homewares, while outside billboards for Le Labo, Heineken and Gillette hover overhead.
Locals on their way to the nearby SoulCycle would likely ignore the facade, if not for the graphic doorway – a collage of graffiti – that pays homage to the building’s storied past. From 1983 to 1988 artist Jean-Michel Basquiat lived and worked here, in what was originally a stable owned by his friend and mentor Andy Warhol.
Just a few blocks south, on a corner of Houston Street, is the famous Bowery mural where the first major outdoor work by Basquiat’s contemporary, Keith Haring, was created in 1982. Back then, the wall was filled with Haring’s famous dancing figures; today, the ever-changing concrete canvas bombards residents with the words “believe” and “love more” in pops of fluoro.
Although the grit is largely gone from downtown Manhattan – the streets these days more Million Dollar Listing than Rent – the presence of both Basquiat and Haring lingers, but you need to know where to look. Their rapid rise from hot young artists to Zeitgeist heroes of the 80s is the stuff of legend, and the fact both passed away prematurely (Basquiat from a heroin overdose at age 27 in 1988;
Haring from AIDS-related complications just two years later at 31) only adds to the mythology.
“This was the first generation of artists that really addressed the outside world instead of the studio world. And the outside world moves at an astonishing speed,” explains Tony Shafrazi, a prolific New York gallerist who nurtured Basquiat’s and Haring’s careers when the two were barely in their 20s.
“They came from a new era, a new phenomenon that didn’t exist before … The value of art was very different and the function of art was very different,” says Shafrazi. Now in his mid-70s, Shafrazi likens the youthquake scene of 1980s New York to the cultural liberation of London 20 years earlier. Downtown was a pressurecooker of politics, fashion and art, which played out in the clubs where Warhol, Debbie Harry, Grace Jones and Madonna (who Basquiat dated briefly) hung out.
Shafrazi says the Vietnam War had rallied a disillusioned youth and its aftermath sparked an explosion of activity on the streets. Haring (who’d grown up in Pennsylvania and studied at art school) always left home with a box of chalk in his pocket to use on black ad panels in the subway, while Basquiat first garnered a cult following for his sarcastic graffiti, or “disjointed street poetry” as one critic put it, using the pseudonym SAMO (a take on ‘same old shit’).
“Both were always in a rush, especially Keith,” says Shafrazi. “They never lounged around. They were driven within [and had] a purpose to learn and then to participate and to act. Keith was very athletic; he had a sense of bounce and fast movements. Basquiat [was] charismatic beyond belief – as soon as he walked into a room, night or day, whether it was 10 people or 1,000 people, the whole place would stop.”
Despite experiencing a similar trajectory in an otherwise elitist art scene, the two never held a joint show. “They had different characters, different energies and different usage of paint and colour and purpose,” says Shafrazi. “Keith was tremendously agile and a great dancer. He literally utilised that form of nonstop line – liquid black line – that allowed him to draw very quickly. Jean-Michel invented a form that hadn’t been done before: free-style drawing and painting. And painting over a mistake and repeating it, being fearless.”
Haring adopted a socialistic point of view and drew attention to the oppression of minorities and, later in his career, AIDS. His famed Pop Shop in SoHo made his art available to the masses. Basquiat’s work, meanwhile, was primitive looking but complex on closer inspection, and tackled social injustice, race, the banality of the modern world and the plight of African Americans. (It’s estimated he created up to 2,000 works in his short career. “Hardly anybody’s ever done that,” says Shafrazi. “Maybe Picasso.”)
Despite the synergies in their practices and ideas, their work has never been shown side by side in public. It is a coup, then, for the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), which will host the world premiere of the Keith Haring/Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines exhibition, to be opened with a gala event on November 29.
“We’ve had year-on-year growth over the past six years, which is predicated on creative risk-taking, often by pairing artists together,” explains NGV director Tony Ellwood AM. “Haring and Basquiat have never been seen as collaborators, but when presented together in an integrated experience you can see how intertwined their lives were and how they’re an incredible intellectual force.”
The exhibition also holds a special relevance to the gallery. In 1984, Haring, then 25, was brought to Australia to complete a number of public projects, including painting the NGV’s famous glass-fronted entrance, known as the Water Window Mural. His nearby Collingwood mural is one of only 31 worldwide known to be still in existence.
Crossing Lines is curated by Dr Dieter Buchhart, the Vienna-based art historian who developed the critically acclaimed Fondation Louis Vuitton exhibition Jean-Michel Basquiat, as well as the groundbreaking Keith Haring retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2013.
“They were both anchored in [the 80s] but they go way ahead,” he says. “Basquiat is talking about our time. The way he worked is the way we work today in our social media and internet society. He foresaw our way of communicating at a time when it was far away for people to see. The same with Keith Haring, who is a forerunner of our emoji culture, even though his signs have multiple meanings.”
Basquiat’s younger sisters, Lisane and Jeanine, who manage the late artist’s estate, offer another reason why his work still holds a certain power: “A lot of the issues that he painted about – and was dealing with at the time – are still happening, specifically in America,” Jeanine tells Vogue. “People want to see what the perspective was of a twentysomething back in the 80s [and] whether it is different from what they’re experiencing and dealing with today.”
Lisane also puts it down to Basquiat’s universality. “I think there’s something for everyone in each of his works: you can look at it and it gives you this view into what you know [as well as] what he saw and witnessed as a human being in the 80s. It has this incredible ability to touch people, whatever things you are going through.”
“Jean-Michel is the most alive person who has passed away that I’m aware of,” Lisane adds. “He passed away 31 years ago yet he is completely alive. And that’s the way he lived.”
Shafrazi agrees, saying that explosive energy is something Haring and Basquiat shared. “They brought something to the art world that had been lost. Never in the history of art have we seen something like this, where teenage excitement, so to speak, was suddenly conquering the world. All youth from here on will be impacted by that.”
Keith Haring/Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines is on at the National Gallery of Victoria from December 1. Go to www.ngv.vic.gov.au.
“Keith was very athletic; he had a sense of bounce and fast movements. Basquiat was charismatic beyond belief – as soon as he walked into a room, the whole place would stop”