MY WILD YEAR WITH BASQUIAT
The artist made their East Vilalge apartment his canvas. Now, 35 years later, Alexis Adler is putting nearly all of it up for bid — including the walls
IF these walls could talk! In Alexis Adler’s case, they did. Even her bathroom door had something to say — Jean-Michel Basquiat, her former roommate with benefits, made sure of that. Before he shot into art-world superstardom and (briefly) Madonna’s arms, the then-18-year-old covered the walls, furniture and floors of their East Village apartment with his trademark symbols, scribbles and scrawls. In time, his works — on canvas — would sell for amazing sums; last year, Christie’s sold one of his paintings, “Dustheads,” for $48.8 million. He was at the height of his powers when he died in 1988 — a victim, says Adler, of
heroin and overpowering pressure. He was 27 years old.
Adler, meanwhile, married, had two children and divorced without ever leaving the railroad flat that she and Basquiat shared from 1979 to 1980. Nor did she erase anything he’d left behind — the “Olive Oyl” he painted on the living-room wall, the “Famous Negro Athletes” he inked on a door.
Now, nearly 35 years after they parted, Adler’s putting almost all of it on the auction block — lock, stock and door.
“It became a burden,” she says of the 40-odd pieces that Christie’s is billing as “Jean-Michel Basquiat: Works from the Collection of Alexis Adler,” a monthlong exhibit and auction beginning Saturday. “I couldn’t hold onto everything, or leave it in a safe-deposit box. It’s not fair to Jean! It needs to get out into the world.”
Adler’s 57 now, an embryologist with a halo of reddish hair and a line of ear piercings. Over green tea the other day, she recalled how she, a Jewish girl from Seattle — a Barnard grad with a biology degree, no less — met the HaitianAmerican high school dropout.
Basquiat was homeless at the time. He’d just been kicked out of his progressive Brooklyn high school — “He pie’d the principal,” recalls longtime chum and SAMO graffiti collaborator Al Diaz — and
If you were downtown In that art scene, It was all about sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. [actually,] It was more about art, drugs and sex.”
— ALEXIS ADLER
was crashing at her friend’s apartment.
Adler, then 22, liked what she saw: a lean, lanky-limbed guy who seemed “deep and introspective,” even in a modified mohawk and the “old man’s overcoat” he bought at a thrift shop.
They started hanging out and eventually found a place of their own, in a rundown building on East 12th Street.
“It was perfect!” Adler says. “Totally raw, with old cabinets that were painted so many times, they couldn’t close.”
Into this home they brought what little they had — her turntable, speakers and college textbooks, and Basquiat’s brushes.
As Adler describes it, living together was less “Barefoot in the Park” and more “Desperately Seeking Susan ”-meets- “The Odd Couple.”
They foraged for furniture off the streets and lived on eggs, grits and cereal. He gave her gifts of painted T-shirts; she brought home batteries to feed his cassette player.
All the while, he painted. Every flat surface was fair game.
“You’d get up in the morning and there was wet paint on the floor,” she says. “From the brooms to the bathroom!” One day she came home with a gold lamé coat she bought in a thrift shop; by morning, he’d painted it pink, black and gray.
“I was a little upset,” she concedes. But she got over it: That coat is one of the few things Basquiat made for her that she hasn’t put up for sale.
Though the pair was “intimate,” they had separate bedrooms and separate lives. She worked a 9-to-5 job in a biology lab; he painted and listened to music all night long. But they shared many interests.
“We went out every night, did drugs every night, saw our friends, danced to music,” she recalls. “I have to explain this to my kids: If you were downtown in that art scene, it was all about sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.” She pauses to reconsider: “It was more about art, drugs and sex.”
But living together became “too complicated,” and after a year, Basquiat left. They remained friends, though, and when he started moving in more exalted circles — Andy Warhol- and Larry Gagosian-size circles — Basquiat would introduce her to his new friends and lovers, one of whom was Madonna.
His star blazed bright, right up to the summer day in 1988 when Adler got a call from their friend, hip-hop’s Fab 5 Freddy: Jean was dead.
“It was heartbreaking that we lost him like that,” she says quietly. “You just can’t save people, you know?”
There are no photos of Basquiat and Adler together, just a few shots they snapped of one another.
“There were no selfies then!” she says. Through the years, whenever she repainted the walls of the apartment, she covered his “Olive Oyl” with plastic. The formerly white, V-neck T-shirt he painted and tailored for her is now the color of tea: She hasn’t washed it since the day she received it, 35 years ago. The more fragile stuff — drawings, sketches, notes — she stored in a safe-deposit box.
For years, her daughter, Zoe, couldn’t understand what the big deal was: Adler simply told her the works were made by an artist friend.
“Then we went to a [Basquiat] show at the Brooklyn Museum,” says Zoe, now 18, “and I saw my mom’s name in one of his paintings, and I thought, ‘Whoa!’ ”
Whoa indeed. If the auction goes as Christie’s plans, Adler’s collection could fetch $3 million or more.
And what might she do with her share of the money?
“I hope to cut back my lab time,” Adler says. “After 27 years, I’d like a little more freedom.”
Jean would have approved.