Rap, race and the untold history of the Renaissance
Fab 5 Freddy has been crucial to the New York art scene. Now he’s shaking things up with a new TV show. Benji Wilson meets him
If you happen to switch on to a new documentary about Italian renaissance art next week, don’t be alarmed. Yes, that is Fab 5 Freddy, the hip-hop pioneer best-known in the UK for getting a mention in Blondie’s single Rapture, acting as your guide to a slew of Renaissance masterpieces. Yes, he is wearing a 10-gallon hat and riding a horse. Yes, he does turn a Brunelleschi sonnet in to a rap battle. And yes, A Fresh Guide to Florence with Fab 5
Freddy is the most unlikely culture clash since Jeremy Paxman grumped his way through Celebrity Bake Off.
Yet beneath the slightly over-egged incongruity, there’s a fascinating new perspective here, and it may just be that “Fab”, as everyone calls him, is the right man to show it to us.
“I wanted to look at the fact that I know that there’s black people featured in some of these paintings and I’d like to know more about them – because there’s very little scholarship out there,” he says.
The film has a sound underlying thesis: that by examining portrayals of racial diversity in Renaissance art, we can see that the idea of race is a social construct that did not really develop until the 1600s.
“Alessandro de’ Medici was essentially black,” says Fab, pointing to his nickname “il Moro” and the long-standing suggestion that the 16th-century duke of Florence was born to a servant of African descent who was working in the Medici household. “Yet the important thing is
that one of the scholars we speak to points out that it was no big deal. What was a big deal for Alessandro was the fact that his mother was of low status. The fact that he might’ve been a little darker than other Italians was not a big deal.”
Although Renaissance art has been studied exhaustively, people of colour who appear in some of the most famous paintings and frescoes, such as Giotto’s Trial by Fire in the Basilica di Santa Croce, The Adoration of the Magi panel by Ghiberti on the famous bronze doors to the Florence Baptistery, or Mantegna’s Scenes from
the Life of Christ in the Uffizi, have received little attention, either in academia or arts documentaries.
“It’s connected to the unfortunate nature of racism where oftentimes, people of colour are just passed over, or people don’t take the effort or the time to go, ‘Who was that guy that’s front and centre in this painting, who is he? Why is he there? Why is he wearing these fine clothes? We should know about him’. That was my interest,” says Fab.
Much of the freshness of this guide comes from its presenter. You might not have expected a lineage of BBC art critics that includes Sister Wendy Beckett and Simon Schama to have alighted on a man best known for graffiti art and popular music (the full Blondie reference, by the way, goes “Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody’s fly/ DJ spinning I said, ‘My My’”).
“I’m an artist and I’m curious, which is essentially how it has always played out for me. I just want answers to questions that I don’t have the answers to,” he says.
Born Fred Brathwaite in 1959, Fab got his sobriquet as a member of the Fabulous 5 graffiti group who painted the sides of subway cars in Brooklyn in the early Eighties. He became friends with Jean-michel Basquiat, the influential artist who also started out on the burgeoning street art scene.
“Jean-michel and I had a thing we used to do we called The Museum Club. We’d spend a Wednesday at the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan, walking around, looking at art, having a great time. That’s how I came to be an artist. I had a sense of art history and would pick up books and read them and look at paintings and go: ‘That’s interesting. I like what this guy did.’ This film about the Renaissance was just an extension of that.”
Artists who have made art themselves, not just read about it, often make the best guides, and Fab, who was instrumental in bringing his cartoon-style graffiti off the street and into art galleries in the early Eighties, is no exception. His favourite moment in a tour that takes in the Uffizi, the Accademia, Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise and the Palazzo Vecchio, was filming under the Medici Chapel of the Basilica di San Lorenzo, where Michelangelo had once hidden.
Michelangelo had been designing the chapel as an elaborate mausoleum for the Medicis, but in 1529 he had joined ranks with republican forces campaigning against the family’s rule. When the Medicis, who at the time included the Pope, won out and vowed vengeance on the opposition forces, Michelangelo went into hiding.
“He got into some beef because he’d kind of been playing both sides of the coin. When the republicans were defeated, Michelangelo felt that the Medicis knew so he found this tiny room under the tombs,” says Fab, who is filmed going into the tombs and is visibly moved by what he discovers.
“They only found these rooms in the Seventies, they cleaned off all this soot and found that Michelangelo did all these drawings on the wall. The public doesn’t get to go down there and see this, but I did. Those are Michelangelo sketches and, for me, it was graffiti I was looking at. Just to see that was astonishing.”
Fab, of course, has been part of his own renaissance, albeit one born in America. Not only was he a key player in the birth of hip-hop, producing and appearing in films such as Wild Style and Downtown ’81 that brought the music, DJS and break-dancing to a mass audience, but he was also one of the founding figures in the art of the period, curating the now legendary show Beyond Words at the Mudd Club. This exhibition introduced the world to Basquiat, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, artists whose work now sells for millions.
“It was the late Seventies, early Eighties, downtown New York and we were just young artists trying to figure it out,” he says. “We met and had similar aspirations and became friends and went to each other’s studios. We all partied together, smoked a lot of pot together and we were just like, same place, same time.”
Still, some would maintain that the art of the Italian Renaissance is of an entirely different order to the fruits of hip-hop culture. Fab takes great pleasure in suggesting otherwise.
“I think it comes down to who is making that classification. There was an elitist thing around a lot of art for a while that was off-putting to me. I remember early on when I was working on being an artist, I would read about some paintings and I could barely understand the articles I was reading. Then I’d see another article on the same paintings and I could completely get it.
“That’s a thing that happens in the art world where sometimes people make things too complicated when they talk about it: they do it as a means to keep people out.”
His own credo on art is simple and inclusive: “It all starts with what you like. If you like it, you can then research that artist and find a little bit more, but you don’t have to have a PHD to understand why you liked this painting as opposed to that painting. I try to tell people it’s a more visceral thing – you need to find something you can relate to and connect to.”
Which is where Fab 5 Freddy presenting a BBC arts show comes in to it. Since the Eighties, Fab has continued creating and selling visual art but has also gone on to present TV shows (including the influential Yo! MTV Raps), direct music videos with artists such as Nas, and latterly appear in arts documentaries about friends such as Basquiat (it was one of those documentaries, last year’s Basquiat: Rage to Riches, that introduced Fab to the director David Shulman, who then suggested they make this film).
With his affable, relatable approach, the filmmakers will hope that a man who calls the life of Caravaggio “some real bad-boy business” will be a draw to those put off by stuffy, reverential arts presenters. But it still doesn’t explain why they put him on a horse.
“I hadn’t been on a horse since I was a kid, but I was determined to do it because I thought it was brilliant idea. You shoulda seen it: a 6ft black man on a horse in Florence amid thousands of tourists … there were a lot of double takes. And then at the end of the film, there’s a brother, a black guy from San Francisco that’s like, ‘Wait a minute, is that Fab 5 Freddy?’ I’m like, ‘That’s right. I’m trying to help people know a little bit more about the Renaissance’.”
A Fresh Guide to Florence with Fab 5 Freddy is on BBC Two at 9pm on Saturday
‘There was an elitist thing around a lot of art for a while … they do it as a means to keep people out’