A Visit with Jean-Michel Basquiat on His Birthday
Second-place winner of the Los Angeles Press Club’s “Best Visual Arts/Design/Architecture Feature” award.
“If I do not know who I am, it is because I think I am the sort of person everyone around me wants to be. Perhaps I have never asked myself whether I really wanted to become what everybody else seems to want to become. Perhaps if I only realized that I do not admire what everyone seems to admire, I would really begin to live after all. I would be liberated from the painful duty of saying what I really do not think and acting in a way that betrays God’s truth and the integrity of my own soul.”
— Thomas Merton
Upon Leaving the Norm
I forgot it was Jean-Michel Basquiat’s birthday. I had been working on a book about him for nearly two years — reading about him; watching documentaries about him; tracking down a little-known painting in Dallas; flying to the Orlando Museum of Art to see an exhibit that was later raided by the F.B.I. (the artworks were fake); flying cross-country to visit his New York City haunts; going to his Los Angeles haunts; attending panel discussions to listen to Jeffrey Deitch, Kenny Scharf, Larry Gagosian, Fred Hoffman, Tamra Davis, Lee Quinones, Toxic, and the Basquiat sisters talk about Jean-Michel; spending hours with his paintings at The Broad museum in L.A.; reading books Jean-Michel read; listening to music he loved — and I still didn’t remember. It wasn’t good. But somehow, by fate or by luck, I ended up at the Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure exhibit, in Los Angeles, on his birthday, December 22. If he had kept living, Jean-Michel would have been sixty-three years old.
It was my tenth visit to the exhibit — technically my eleventh since I went to the original show, in 2022, in New York City. I went to King Pleasure all those times because it was a rare, fleeting opportunity to collect a lot of information that would otherwise be impossible to find — as far as I knew, there was no Basquiat archive, open to researchers, where I could spend months, even years, looking into Jean-Michel’s life and work. To get around that, I had King Pleasure, where I could go as often as I wanted for as long as I wanted as long as I coughed up the cash for a ticket.
So on another blue-sky Friday in L.A., on December 22, I ended up, once again, at King Pleasure. During the 37-minute drive to the show, zipping east on the surface streets, I was feeling wistful — in only ten days, on January 1, King Pleasure would close for good. I had been going to the exhibit since its opening, on March 31, and it had turned into something deeper than a fact-finding trip… it’s hard to explain, but I was getting some kind of nourishment from the thing.
I should back up a bit and lay out some essential facts.
Jean-Michel Basquiat is an American artist who was born on December 22, 1960, in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Gerard, was a Haitian immigrant and his mother, Matilde, was born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents. Jean-Michel had an older brother, Max, who was stillborn in 1959, and two younger sisters, Lisane and Jeanine.
In the months leading up to Jean-Michel’s birth, incredible change was sweeping through Africa, with more than fifteen countries gaining independence from colonialist rule. One of those African nations was the Republic of the Congo, where Patrice Lumumba, who was only thirty-five years old, became prime minister in June 1960. He was intelligent, charismatic, and brave, supporting the liberation of colonial territories in Africa and refusing to be a puppet of the world’s major powers. Western countries, including the United States, quickly saw him as a threat to their political and economic interests. So much so, Lumumba was assassinated on January 17, 1961 — only weeks after Jean-Michel was born.
Also, in 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States; African American students held sit-ins at segregated restaurants and diners in the South; Algerians continued to battle the French government for independence; and, in December 1960, legendary drummer Max Roach released We Insist!, a jazz album that addressed slavery, the civil rights movement, and the wave of independence moving through Africa. 1960, in fact, is considered the year when jazz moved into a new era of change and innovation — Miles Davis, for example, released Sketches of Spain in July 1960 and John Coltrane recorded My Favorite Things in the fall of 1960.
So Jean-Michel was brought into a world going through fantastic rebellion, change, and innovation — things that would show up in his own life and work.
Interestingly, Jean-Michel, who was raised a Christian, was given a name packed with spiritual connotations: Jean is widely considered to mean “God is gracious,” while Michel means “gift from God” or “who resembles God.”
For the meaning of Basquiat, I reached out to Michel Fragasso, a well-regarded expert in French names. He replied with this email:
The surname « Basquiat » is a toponymic surname referring to the Basque Country (“Pays Basque”). This is a territory in northern Spain and southwestern France. Most of it is in Spain.
For decades, this entity wanted to secede from Spain and France. There were several terrorist attacks by the ETA [Euskadi Ta Azkatasuna] in the late 20th Century. This has calmed down since a few decades. The Spanish Government was very efficient in repressing it.
This surname is in the same etymologic group as Basquat and Basque.
Which is fascinating. Pablo Picasso was one of Jean-Michel’s favorite artists. One of Picasso’s most famous works is about the bombing of Guernica. Guernica is located in the Basque Country. One of Jean-Michel’s favorite paintings was Guernica by Picasso.
In May 1968, at the age of seven, Jean-Michel was hit by a car and seriously injured — he had to have his spleen removed. (Weeks later, in June 1968, while Jean-Michel was recuperating, Andy Warhol was shot and underwent his own intrusive surgery. They’d become close friends fourteen years later, both living with visible scars on their abdomens.) Around the same time, his parents separated, and, in 1977, Gerard took a lifelong partner in Nora Fitzpatrick, who became a stepmother to Jean-Michel and his sisters. But Jean-Michel started to clash with Gerard over the direction of his life.
“Jean-Michel struggled a lot in school,” Lisane wrote in the King Pleasure catalog. “It’s hard to imagine someone carrying that kind of energy within their soul and not knowing what to do with it, or not having anyone around who really understood it.
“It was also very challenging for my father, who was raised in a culture where being a fully educated, white-collar professional or business person was the only barometer of success. They both had ambitions, but saw the path to fulfilling them through two completely different lenses.”
She added, “Jean-Michel was committed to being an artist, and my father’s fears for him — not having a life of stability and security — came out as anger and frustration.”
Jean-Michel ran away from home a few times, heading into Manhattan.
“One day he was there,” Lisane wrote, “and then one day he wasn’t — there was really no discussion about it. Jean-Michel was never going to conform to the vision my father had for his life.”
Then he left for good when he was still a teenager.
In Manhattan, Jean-Michel couch-surfed; lived off cheese doodles because they were cheap; hung out at the Mudd Club; looked for, and found, much-needed money on the floor of the Mudd Club; befriended artists and musicians; spray-painted street poetry-philosophy on buildings under the name “SAMO;” routinely appeared in, or worked on, the cult public-access show TV Party; started an experimental band called Gray that was decades ahead of its time; and constantly made art — one way or another.
In 1978, Kenny Scharf, the Pop surrealist artist, first met Jean-Michel at the School of Visual Arts on East 23rd Street. But Basquiat wasn’t a student — somehow he had snuck in.
“One day I walked into the cafeteria of SVA,” Scharf said at a King Pleasure panel discussion that I attended in July 2023, “and there is Jean. He was seventeen, and I’m nineteen, and he just kind of looks at me, and I lock eyes with him, and my first reaction was like, Who is this guy? He was so intense. He had an intensity about him.”
Scharf went on, “And he says, ‘Let’s see what’s in there.’ I had one of those portfolios that artists used to walk around with. So I said, ‘Yeah. Okay.’ And then I show him this painting, and he says, ‘You’re going to be famous.’ I was like, What?! What a thing to say to somebody you just met. It really hit me.”
Scharf and Jean-Michel found out that they lived only a block away from each other in Chelsea, the neighborhood just north of Greenwich Village. So they started hanging out; Scharf introduced him to the artist Keith Haring; and Scharf visited Jean-Michel at his apartment.
“All these collages and drawings were all scattered on the floor,” Scharf said at King Pleasure, “and there was this one piece on the wall in the kitchen, and I looked at it, and I was like — I swear, I’ve never seen this piece again, it’s probably destroyed — but the image blew me away. It was a drawing-slash-collage on paper of the Kennedy assassination. And the thing about Jean’s work that hit me then — and every time I see it to this day — is the energy pow-ing you. I felt like somebody had just socked me in the face, and it threw me. To this day, I’m describing it, and it gets me excited because I could see there’s so much power and energy in this scratchy, crazy, erratic drawing. So I was blown away by him right away.”
Other young artists had the same reaction, and Jean-Michel quickly made a name for himself.
“Jean-Michel had this inner compass to get himself right to the center of the discourse,” said Jeffrey Deitch, the well-regarded art dealer, at the King Pleasure panel in July. “It’s an amazing thing he had.”
Deitch, who was a part of New York’s downtown art scene in the ’70s and ‘80s, added, “Jean-Michel had this incredible charisma. And the power that we see in [his] art, he embodied in his persona. Sometimes with artists, it’s hard for them to find their way and get discovered. But from the very beginning, the other artists and the scene and the writers and hangers-on, they all knew that Jean-Michel was an extraordinary talent.”
So did Jean-Michel, who always told friends that he would be world-famous. By 1980, at the age of nineteen, he was on his way.
Between 1980 and 1988, Jean-Michel was the lead actor in an independent film about New York’s downtown art and music scenes; sold paintings to art collectors all over the world; lived in NoHo and the East Village in New York City; regularly traveled to Los Angeles to work; made a hip-hop record under his own label; earned a boatload of money; collaborated with Andy Warhol; landed on the cover of The New York Times Magazine; walked the runway for Comme des Garcons; traveled to Europe, Asia, and Africa; hung out with all kinds of celebrities and top-tier artists; and, most importantly, always kept creating.
“I’m not an elitist artist,” Jean-Michel said in a 1988 interview, “but an autodidact who would like to be a part of the family of artists.”
It’s difficult to put exact numbers on the paintings and drawings that Jean-Michel had done, but the figures that are going around among journalists these days are more than 600 paintings and 1,500 drawings. In his superb book The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Fred Hoffman, an art historian and friend of Jean-Michel’s who worked with him in Los Angeles, estimates between 850 and 1,000 works on paper and around 1,000 paintings and assemblage-object paintings. Read The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and you’ll be inclined to believe Fred. Whatever the final numbers are, they’re a lot — and Jean-Michel didn’t even make it out of the ‘80s.
On Friday, August 12, 1988, Jean-Michel died from a drug overdose in his studio-home at 57 Great Jones Street in New York City. He was twenty-seven — the same age that Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse passed away. Jean-Michel’s family was devastated. On Instagram, Lisane wrote recently: “For 35 years, I’ve watched my family limp about, heal, adjust, and show up… It has been an extremely challenging and personal journey that has shaped so much of how I see the world.”
Things got tricky with handling the artworks that Jean-Michel had left behind, but, ultimately, Gerard Basquiat became executor of the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. After Matilde passed away in 2008 and Gerard died in 2013, Jean-Michel’s sisters became co-executors. In 2022, Lisane and Jeanine organized the King Pleasure exhibit in New York City, featuring Jean-Michel’s paintings, drawings, and personal items. The sisters then brought the show to The Grand L.A., a luxury-hotel complex in Downtown Los Angeles, in 2023.
Those are the essential facts.
For the heck of it, I asked the Federal Bureau of Investigation if they had a file on Jean-Michel. An FBI official got back to me promptly, saying they did not.
As for me, I first learned about Jean-Michel when I was fifteen years old. My father was always reading The New York Times, leaving the day’s paper on the coffee table in our family room. On Sunday, February 10, 1985, I saw Jean-Michel staring at me from the cover of The New York Times Magazine. I read the story straight through, and, when I finished, I only wanted to know more.
But, in the summer of 1988, again in our family room, I learned that Jean-Michel had died. I was stunned, and read The New York Times obituary over and over, trying to make sense of what had happened. Eight years later, I saw the film Basquiat by the artist Julian Schnabel. From that point on, I’ve always kept an eye out for Jean-Michel’s soulful, compelling art.
In 2022, I started work on a book about Jean-Michel soon after I watched The Andy Warhol Diaries, a Netflix docuseries by Andrew Rossi. Jean-Michel was featured in episodes four, five, and six. There were many reasons why I began the project, but, in the end, I wanted to right some wrongs — a gang of vicious critics had spread hurtful, bogus ideas about Jean-Michel and his work, which have trailed him both during and after his lifetime. There was more than a touch of racism directed at Jean-Michel. And there was more than a touch of downplaying his talent, his intellect, and his place in art history. All of it angered me so much that I decided to confront those critics — we can’t allow the bullies of the world to get away with their crap.
It was the same kind of moral outrage that carried me into investigative journalism, in the late 1990s, in New York and then housing justice activism, in 2017, in Los Angeles, where I live now. I figured an investigative journalist-activist such as myself — with ZERO connections in the art world — could dig around, be beholden to no one, and be able write a righteous truth about the whole thing… from my own journalism-activism-outsider perspective, of course.
I also had a number of intangibles that could help me write about Jean-Michel.
For one thing, I lived in New York City from the late 1980s through the late 1990s, spending several years near NoHo and in the East Village, where Jean-Michel lived and worked. And I came from a long line of New Yorkers, going back to the 1800s. So the city runs in my blood, and I could understand things that others may not know about New York, which is a huge part of Jean-Michel’s story. And, of course, I had a certain understanding of his time in Los Angeles — in fact, Basquiat’s first gallery show in L.A. took place only a few blocks from where I live.
There were other intangibles.
I had a solid grasp of power and racism through my work as a journalist and activist, and, since I’m a gay man, I knew what it was like to be a target of discrimination — both by institutions and people. And I knew of the disappointment and anger and fear and hurt and depression and confusion when one is targeted, and how all of that can drain a person, especially for one who feels and senses things more deeply than others.
The intangibles, I felt, mattered…
Eventually, I concluded that the nastiest critics — Robert Hughes danced on Jean-Michel’s grave by writing a disgusting post-mortem piece titled “Requiem for a Featherweight” and Hilton Kramer said, in 1982, that Jean-Michel’s “contribution to art is so minuscule as to be practically nil” — used Jean-Michel as a weapon to make their case against a new, emerging group of art dealers and wealthy collectors. But I’ll get into that later.
So there I was on a sunny Friday in L.A., parking in the garage of a luxury hotel, taking the elevator up to the fourth floor, and walking over to the entrance of King Pleasure, where I saw a life-size picture of Jean-Michel, his eyes closed and head tilted up to the sun, framed by black, blue, and orange balloons with a lit votive candle at his feet. It looked like a shrine — but the balloons and candle had never been there before, which made me wonder what was going on. A young woman scanned my ticket and gave me directions, I listened quietly for the tenth time, and then I walked into Gallery One. Right away, Jean-Michel spoke to me.
It wasn’t an otherworldly voice, but an audio track — boomed from speakers overhead — of Jean-Michel reciting what sounded like poetry. He talked fast and emphatically with a machine-gun rhythm: “Breathing into his lungs, the dust of life, 2,000 years before asbestos. Nicotine homeboy walks on eggshells, very much medicated, much medicated.” A staff member had told me it was a voiceover outtake from the film Jean-Michel had starred in.
From there, I walked into the first room — one of Jean-Michel’s famous skull paintings immediately to the left, three self-portraits on another wall, and three video monitors to the right, showing home movies from when Jean-Michel was a kid. It was there that I heard a woman say it was his birthday. She was thrilled, but I was disappointed in myself… and you know the rest.
With each visit, the home movies became more and more fascinating. In one of them, Jean-Michel is wrapped up in pajamas and a beige robe, wearing dark slippers — everything fits perfectly and looks perfect. He’s a very cute kid with a very cute smile, which comes easily. He sort of mugs for the camera here and there, but other times he seems to be running away from it, as if he doesn’t want to be filmed.
In another scene from the same home movie, Jean-Michel wears a white cardigan sweater, gray pants, white shoes, and a kind of beret with “U.S. Navy” written on it — the whole look is pulled off flawlessly.
In a different home movie, Jean-Michel — probably around eight or nine — plays with his sisters at Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Again, he’s dressed perfectly and looks perfect, with a light-green, long-sleeve, paisley shirt and rust-colored shorts that go to his knees and brown socks and black shoes — he also has a spiffy haircut with a part on the side.
So after watching the home movies several times, I wondered if Gerard and Matilde’s superb sense of style for their young son later gave Jean-Michel a pitch-perfect taste in clothes that, in real ways, added to his allure as an artist. I also wondered if that constant, early exposure in front of a movie camera later informed the way Jean-Michel interacted with TV crews and photographers — sometimes he looked as if he wanted to flee a TV interview, other times he looked relaxed and hammed it up. I’d stand in front of those monitors and things like that would swirl in my mind.
My favorite artwork in this room is Untitled (No Summer Hot Water Ossning) — probably a purposeful misspelling of a river town in the suburbs of New York City. The drawing on paper, using a ballpoint pen and crayon, is a kind of Basquiat family tree with the names of his relatives and family members and various family highlights, such as “Lisa ran away” and “Jeanine an ‘A’ student.”
Within the names and highlights, Jean-Michel drew arrows going up and down and sideways, adding an “evil eye.” And he used a kind of poetry in the piece, such as “30 blocks for bagels” and “Bongos in the bs’mnt.” and “No summer hot water Ossning,” the unofficial title of the work. Through that poetry, Jean-Michel seemed to be leaving hints, which was what grabbed me. That and the movement of the drawing, going up and down and sideways with the arrows. It’s one of the most enticing family trees you’ll ever come across.
Then I walked down a hallway and the sisters welcomed me through a looped recording that was boomed out from another overhead speaker: “Hi! This is Jeanine. And this is Lisane. Welcome to the Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure exhibition. Step forward for an intimate glimpse into the life and journey of Jean-Michel Basquiat.”
So I listened to the sisters for the tenth time and walked forward and looked left, where hung on the wall were large, elegant portraits of Gerard, Jeanine, and Matilde, which were painted by Andy Warhol. (Matilde loved the artwork — and apparently so did her kids. In a note to Warhol, dated May 20, 1985, she wrote, “The portrait brought a twinkle in the children’s eyes. Thank you ever so much.” The note appears in the excellent book Warhol on Basquiat: The Iconic Relationship Told in Andy Warhol’s Words & Pictures edited by Michael Dayton Hermann.)
Then I looked to the right, in this same area, and saw on a wall, and enclosed in a long, glass case, artworks by Jean-Michel when he was in high school and some pieces from the 1980s. The high school artworks were telling.
For one, from 1977, he drew a street scene of a person floating with a balloon above a bunch of faceless nine-to-fivers in Manhattan — all of whom have dollar signs drawn on their chests. There’s a kind of caption, perhaps a bit sarcastic, to describe them: “Working class heroes.” The person holding the balloon, who has a star on his or her chest, looks down at them and sighs, “Ho-hum.” Above the person, to the right, Jean-Michel wrote: “Upon leaving the ‘NORM’…” For me, it showed that the teenaged Jean-Michel wanted no part of the nine-to-five life. Instead, he wanted to transcend it — the person floating with a balloon.
Also, in this room, there was a video of the sisters, a cousin, and a family friend telling stories about the young Jean-Michel — Basquiat’s niece, Sophia Heriveaux, shot all the interviews in the exhibit. At one point, Steven Worthy, the family friend, talked about the time Jean-Michel arrived at a party when he was a child.
“He was just very calm, very intelligent,” Worthy said. “We have some guests that come into our house, you know, they’re kids, they want to, ‘Let’s go out, play, and run around.’ And he was just very subdued. He preferred to go up and draw. So we said, ‘Yeah, I prefer that, too, let’s go up and draw.’ You know, he was just drawing his own original art. It was just a natural communication vehicle for him.”
Remember that. It’s important.
After that, the sisters re-created the kitchen and family room of their home in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Boerum Hill. In the family room, there were lots of books : 1876 by Gore Vidal; With Kennedy by Pierre Salinger; Principles of Accounting; I’m OK — You’re OK by Thomas Anthony Harris; The Godfather by Mario Puzo; Animal Farm by George Orwell; In the Clearing by Robert Frost; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig; and, among others, a book about Muhammad Ali . There was also a brown-and-gray-and-tan multi-patterned sofa; a large, dark-wood RCA TV with a sculpture or carving of a seal on top of it; a beige rug; a low, white coffee table with an ashtray on top of it; and a Honeywell Chronotherm thermostat.
In the kitchen, there was a spice rack of McCormick Black Pepper, McCormick Mustard Seed, McCormick Caraway Seed, and many other spices (Gerard liked to cook), and there was a dark-wood dining table with six places; a small grandfather clock hung on an exposed-brick wall; a dark-wood cabinet filled with china pieces and glasses; and a small fireplace.
It was all very tasteful, warm, and welcoming — like any tasteful, warm, and welcoming middle-class home. Adding to the vibe, Ella Fitzgerald could be heard singing a heart-aching rendition of “Bewitched” — Gerard always listened to music when he was home.
Then boom! I walked into a room filled with Jean-Michel’s extraordinary paintings.
The room with the art — a kind of L-shaped room — was a striking counterpoint to the comfortable, middle-class kitchen and family room. The L-shaped room exploded with colors and life and creativity and genius and risk-taking. You could see why Jean-Michel needed to get out: it was a matter of life or death.
Not a physical death, but an emotional, spiritual, creative kind of death. Maybe the teenaged Jean-Michel understood that in some vague, instinctual way, and then drummed up the courage to get out of his father’s home in Brooklyn, probably taking an anxious subway ride on the D train into Manhattan. Because if he didn’t leave, it would have been the death of his truest self.
The one painting, in this room, that always pulled me in is Dry Cell from 1988. It’s big — around eight feet by nine feet — with a yellow background that pops. In the middle of it is a portrait of a mandrill — a large West African baboon. What grabbed me, every time, is the pride and stateliness of the mandrill. You can feel it, beaming out of the mandrill’s eyes — for me, the eyes are key in many of Basquiat’s artworks… it was the way he created a vibe for a piece… always check out the eyes. Dry Cell, his family said, is one of the last paintings Jean-Michel completed before his death.
During my visit to King Pleasure, I wrote, as always, lots of notes. Here are some from this section of the exhibit:
– “Louis and Ella sing ‘Cheek to Cheek.’ Few people taking selfies. Focused on the art. Respectful.”
– “You start wondering what was going on in JMB’s brain when he made these things. What was he trying to communicate?”
– “He’s referencing art history and U.S. history and world history and science and current affairs. It was ridiculous that those critics said he had no substance. It’s so ridiculous it shows that those critics were up to something: no substance makes no sense.”
– “Ella’s singing suits JMB’s paintings.”
– “Don’t know why, but I’m getting emotional as I listen to Ella and look at JMB’s work. Maybe it has something to do with his birthday. Or maybe it’s all the beauty rushing at me, touching something raw inside. The next song is ‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off’ by Louis and Ella. Wonderful. ‘Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto, let’s call the whole thing off…’ My mind smiles. I feel myself settling down.”
I still don’t know exactly why I got emotional, but maybe it had something to do with this…
Sometimes when I walked through the exhibit, I’d feel a kind of sadness: yet another artist was taken down by the disease of addiction. I don’t know Jean-Michel’s full story, and he tried to get clean numerous times, but drug addiction took him down.
From my own experience, I was addicted to alcohol. It was definitely a form of self-medication, which I didn’t understand until I got sober. I also fell for the horribly stupid cliché of the hard-drinking writer: to be a true writer, I had to be a take-no-prisoners boozer like Ernest Hemingway or Jack Kerouac. There are similar clichés among other artists. (Don’t fall for it!)
And sometimes when I walked through King Pleasure, I’d feel another kind of sadness, thinking about Jean-Michel’s unfulfilled promise. I’d think about what he would be doing now if he hadn’t died, and what the world would be like if he had kept making his soul-stirring, establishment-busting art.
Those thoughts were hard to avoid, at times, when I moved through the exhibit. By my tenth visit, maybe the pent-up emotions were released when I looked at Jean-Michel’s art and listened to Ella…
My other favorites in the L-shaped room were Untitled (Cowboy and Indian) from 1982, Jailbirds from 1983, and Untitled (Pamphlet). Pamphlet is an ink on paper piece that’s only ten inches in diameter. Except for a kind of arrow, it’s all capitalized words: “9. PAMPHLET. PAPER, 1853 ENGLAND THE PAMPHLET IS ENTITLED ‘THE N — -R QUESTION’ BY” and a word is crossed out. (Jean-Michel spelled out the “N” word.)
Pamphlet is important. It shows an artist who felt compelled to publicly confront racism, which doesn’t always go over well with one group of people or another, especially in the 1980s. Jean-Michel didn’t care. He stuck to his convictions. So Pamphlet also shows the substantive, uncompromising nature of Jean-Michel as an artist.
In fact, the substance thing was what really came across after you visited King Pleasure a few times. Jean-Michel was an artist whose substance was true and profound and holy — he wasn’t fooling around. He was going for something meaty and world-changing. In other words, he was, most probably, trying to change the world with his art.
That’s not easy on a person. World-changing art takes thought and bravery and excellence and idealism and sensitivity and smarts and sophistication, if done properly. To constantly summon all that up, time and again, over a short period of years can take a toll — mental, physical, spiritual.
Jean-Michel disliked talking about his art with reporters, but, in 1985, he opened up in an interview with Geoff Dunlop and Sandy Nairne — it can be found in the outstanding book The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader by Jordana Moore Saggese. He said about his early paintings: “I was trying to communicate an idea. I was trying to paint a very urban landscape, and I was trying to make paintings different from the paintings that I saw a lot of at the time, which were mostly Minimal and they were highbrow and alienating. And I wanted to make very direct paintings that most people would feel the emotion behind when they saw them.”
Plug emotion into substance, add a desire to make world-changing art, and you’ve got something astonishingly powerful that never fades away. Just ask Kenny Scharf.
L.A. Sets Jean-Michel Free
Off to the side, on a wall in Gallery One, there was a map of where Jean-Michel lived and worked and hung out in Los Angeles. The L.A. part of his story isn’t often mentioned by New York journalists. It’s as if they don’t want to share him, or maybe they think it’s unimportant, but they would be wrong.
Jean-Michel started flying out to L.A. in the spring of 1982 for a big-time solo show at the Larry Gagosian Gallery in West Hollywood, a small city in between Beverly Hills and Los Angeles. Gagosian, who would later become a world-famous art dealer, invited him to L.A. after seeing Jean-Michel’s work at the Annina Nosei Gallery in New York City.
“In the last room in the gallery,” Gagosian said at a King Pleasure panel discussion that I attended in August 2023, “I saw five or six paintings [by Jean-Michel], and it just stopped me cold in my tracks. It was the kind of thing where my hair stood on end, literally. I was just transfixed by these paintings and how powerful and original they seemed to me.”
In short order, Nosei, one of the first art-world insiders to give Jean-Michel a big break, introduced Gagosian to Basquiat. The two men shared a joint in Nosei’s office, and then, a day or two later, Gagosian asked Jean-Michel if he’d like to have a show in L.A.
“He was totally up for it,” Gagosian said, “and Annina was very gracious about it. She gave it the green light.”
(Gagosian was interesting at the King Pleasure panel. His eyes seemed to well up at times when he talked about Jean-Michel. I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it, but a woman sitting to my left, who knew Gagosian, whispered to me that she was surprised to see him become so emotional. So I figured I wasn’t imagining it.)
Opening on April 8, 1982, the Gagosian show, for Jean-Michel, was a raging success, featuring eye-catching artworks and completely selling out — Untitled (L.A. Painting), one of my favorites by Basquiat, was displayed there. In fact, Eli Broad, a wealthy L.A. businessman who would end up with one of the most impressive private contemporary-art collections in the United States, bought artwork at that show.
Decades later, Eli and his wife, Edythe, built The Broad museum in Downtown L.A. as a kind of civic project, sharing their massive collection with the public — free of charge. Today, The Broad devotes two viewing areas for only Jean-Michel, showing thirteen paintings that Eli and Edythe bought from him. Fred Hoffman told me, via email, that the artworks at The Broad are among Jean-Michel’s very best. Perhaps tellingly, The Broad, a Los Angeles museum, owns more Basquiat paintings than New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art — combined!
Then, in November 1982, Jean-Michel returned to L.A. Through a connection to Gagosian, Tamra Davis, a young film student at the time and who would later make a documentary about Basquiat, was given the job of picking him up at the airport.
“I had no idea what he looked like,” Davis said at the King Pleasure panel in August. “I didn’t know who he was or anything. And so I go and see this guy and he’s so gorgeous, but nothing like you’ve ever seen.”
Wasting no time, Gagosian introduced Jean-Michel to Fred Hoffman, who had just started a print publishing business called New City Editions in the L.A. oceanfront neighborhood called Venice Beach, a longtime stomping ground for artists. Soon after they talked, Hoffman and Jean-Michel began work on a challenging, large-scale silkscreen project, producing one of Basquiat’s legendary artworks: Tuxedo.
In a Gagosian press release from 1983, Tuxedo was called a “painting multiple.” It measures eight-and-a-half feet by five feet, with one of Jean-Michel’s iconic crowns placed at the top. Below the crown, there are fifteen original drawings, most of them packed with words, that were photo-transferred to silkscreens and then applied to canvas using printer’s ink. No Summer Hot Water Ossning, the Basquiat family tree, is one of the drawings in the piece.
With white words and images on a black background, and with the large size of the painting, Tuxedo is a majestic work that’s historical and cerebral and mysterious, as if Jean-Michel has created some kind of puzzle for the viewer. The Paris Review, the prestigious literary magazine, was so impressed that it published a “portfolio” of Tuxedo in the Spring 1983 issue.
“It’s a very ambitious print,” Hoffman said at the King Pleasure panel in August. “It took months to organize how to make this work. But Jean-Michel and I really connected from the get-go, and I had a clear sense of how to bring it along, who to bring in, and we had ten different assistants working on different phases.”
Tuxedo was unlike anything Jean-Michel had done before, and nothing like his paintings that had bold, colorful images. But like his previous artworks, he still seemed to be making social commentary about America and, possibly, Western civilization.
What’s intriguing is that at the top of the painting, just below the crown, is a drawing that features different aspects of U.S. currency. Jean-Michel even made a point of writing “(currency)” in the bottom right-hand corner of the drawing. Below that are fourteen other drawings, which are jammed with facts — modern and ancient — from American, European, and world history. Such as Malcolm X, the boxer Joe Lewis, Haitian baseball factories, Henry Ford, Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and Pope Alexander VI, who issued a papal bull, in 1493, that authorized Spain and Portugal to colonize the Americas and its native people and permitted the use of slavery — all in the name of God.
Jean-Michel also included facts about his Haitian-Puerto Rican-American family through No Summer Hot Water Ossning, inserting his family’s place within the history of Western civilization. It’s not only a point of pride, but could also be a kind of correction for the whitewashing of the past: ‘Hey! You can’t ignore or erase us. We made contributions, too!’ The mentions of Malcolm X, Joe Lewis, and Haitian baseball factories could be taken that way as well. (In the 1970s, Haiti was the largest manufacturer and exporter of baseballs in the world.)
And all of that history, laid out in the painting like a pyramid, moves upward to the drawing about U.S. currency. For the final touch, Jean-Michel placed a crown on top of everything, as if he’s saying money is king — and the constant drive for it, by the powers-that-be, has impacted people and events throughout history. Tuxedo could only be imagined, and then executed, by a visionary. That’s a fact, not an opinion.
Hoffman and Jean-Michel bonded not only over their collaboration, but also, unsurprisingly, art history.
“I have a background in the history of art,” Hoffman explained. “So we shared a lot about art history together. I had a very engaged relationship with Jean-Michel around Leonardo da Vinci. I had a fairly extensive library of books on da Vinci, which I would bring over to the studio all the time and we would riffle through them.”
Hoffman added, “He had such a great understanding of the history of art. He understood exactly how he saw himself in the lineage of great artists. We were working on these silkscreen paintings, which were basically take the silkscreen, apply it to a painting, and then he would paint over it. There was a whole group of guys that would be holding these different screens. He’d say, ‘Take that one. Let’s use red.’ And he started building up these paintings. Ultimately, it was like forty different paintings we made, but working on several at once. And as he started working, it became so clear that he has a complete understanding of the practice of the great masters.”
Fred looked after Jean-Michel. He found a studio for him on Market Street near the beach in Venice; took Jean-Michel and Madonna, his then girlfriend, to lunch at the commissary of 20th Century-Fox; and introduced Jean-Michel to the mighty Robert Rauschenberg — they met up one night at the Gemini G.E.L., a renowned artist’s workshop on Melrose Avenue in L.A.
“He and Bob spent an hour in the print shop area,” said Hoffman, “and it was a complete connection. He went back there a couple of times after that: once with me, and I know on his own.”
Jean-Michel, in fact, routinely told interviewers that Rauschenberg, a Neo-Dadaist, was one of his favorite artists. Basquiat also said that when he was a youngster, Dadaism, an art movement from the early 20th century that rejected traditional artistic values and was a kind of response to World War I, grabbed his attention.
Rauschenberg and Jean-Michel actually shared a process of using found objects to create works of art, such as turning a discarded window frame into a painting or transforming an abandoned TV into a sculpture — something the teenaged Basquiat had done often before he got the money to buy paints and canvases. The results were often inspiring: Jean-Michel, for example, used wooden slats from a fence outside his Venice studio as a canvas for the mesmerizing Gold Griot.
Whenever Hoffman writes or talks about Jean-Michel, you quickly sense a man who cared a lot about his friend and would do anything for him. You also realize that Hoffman has a darn good handle on things, coming up with big-picture connections that others cannot.
At King Pleasure, Hoffman had a particularly thoughtful take on Jean-Michel’s time in Los Angeles. By around 1984, Hoffman said, Jean-Michel was “already conflicted about how he was being received in New York. I think there were certain people in the New York art world that just weren’t willing to engage Jean-Michel’s work. I think that hurt him a lot, and he became even more introspective, and I think that L.A. provided a relief valve, where he didn’t have to be under that intense pressure of making it in New York. He could just come out here and enjoy himself — and he could also come out here and get a lot of work done.”
If you read about the L.A. art scene of the 1960s, such as the book Rebels in Paradise by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, artists were always talking about how Los Angeles gave them a freedom to create whatever they wanted to create. That they wouldn’t have had the same freedom in New York City, and that they didn’t want to deal with the rules and theories set down by New York’s art-world establishment — there’s a reason Andy Warhol had his first show in L.A., not New York.
So white and African American artists started up their own scenes with their own galleries. Ferus Gallery showed white artists such as Ed Kienholz, Billy Al Bengston, and Ed Ruscha while Brockman Gallery and Gallery 32 featured Black artists such as David Hammons, Senga Nengudi, and Betye Saar . And then they rocked it, without being hemmed in by rules.
(L.A.’s Black artists from the 1960s and ’70s, including Betye Saar and David Hammons, were world-class in the use of found objects. The 2011 exhibit “Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles: 1960–1980” at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles proved that. So does the book L.A. Object & David Hammons Body Prints. What Jean-Michel had in common with Saar and Hammons, among others, was an exquisite eye, and a nimble intellect, for creating something beautiful, and powerful, out of the seemingly mundane. Incredible talents.)
In the 1980s, that freedom vibe was still there in Los Angeles — but so was the art-world establishment in New York City.
It didn’t matter if you were a young artist, like Jean-Michel, living off the beaten path in a tattered, five-story walk-up on a drug-ridden block in the East Village. Once you started getting known, you still had to deal with a confusing, nerve-rattling mix of art critics, museum directors, art dealers, old collectors, new collectors, younger artists who were highly competitive, older artists who were still competitive, and all types of con men and whack jobs looking to make a quick buck. By going to L.A., as Fred Hoffman pointed out, Jean-Michel could take a break from the art-world establishment — and all its soul-sucking weirdness. In fact, by the end of his life, he reportedly wanted to flee New York.
But Jean-Michel didn’t go to L.A. to take a vacation — he went there to work… and to have some fun, too. He’d stay at a classy hotel (the Chateau Marmont on the Sunset Strip or the more low-profile L’Ermitage hotel in Beverly Hills or the Beverly Wilshire Hotel); work only yards away from the Pacific Ocean at his studio in Venice; work with Hoffman on projects; get driven around town by one of his friends, such as Tamra Davis or Matt Dike (Jean-Michel didn’t have a driver’s license); shop for designer clothes at Maxfield in West Hollywood; watch old movies and art-house films at the Nuart Theater in West Los Angeles; probably make the one-two visit to Book Soup and Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard that artists, musicians, and writers always made when visiting L.A.; party at Power Tools and the Rhythm Lounge; and buy a ten-gallon cowboy hat to wear while he kept coming up with one fantastic painting after another. Boom, boom, boom.
“He liked to have a good time,” Gagosian said at King Pleasure, “but he was a hard worker.”
Tamra Davis saw that, too.
“That’s what Jean-Michel did,” she said. “He worked. It wasn’t just saying, ‘I’m going to be the greatest artist.’ He did so many paintings. He made it so.”
Hoffman said: “It’s just hard to imagine how much work Jean-Michel produced here in Los Angeles. At least a hundred canvases in eighteen months. It’s an extraordinary amount of work.”
That work ethic didn’t allow for distractions.
“If you wanted to see him,” Davis said at King Pleasure, “I would have to go by his studio to hang out with him, and it was rare that he would allow anybody to go there. So I would kind of duck into a corner and bring a camera.”
She added, “But you couldn’t talk to him. You had to be super quiet and not say a word because you didn’t want to get kicked out or whatever if you engaged too much. So you had to just be there enough to where he had something to say. You could comment, but not interrupt him.”
The freedom thing in L.A. was something that not only artists felt. Over the years, I’ve interviewed people who were born and bred New Yorkers, but ended up living in L.A. They all said that Los Angeles was very different compared to New York. In fact, they all rolled out the same reasons: they didn’t feel tied down by tradition in L.A.; they didn’t worry about having the “right” connections to start a new business in L.A.; and they could take chances with their work and not be called a nut. In short, they felt free.
Knowing all that, it’s no surprise that Jean-Michel, a free-thinking rebel who always demanded freedom in his life and work, enjoyed L.A. — and flourished in it. Tuxedo is a stand-out example of that.
Another thing L.A. offered to Jean-Michel is the city’s unique light, which makes the sky and hills and beaches spectacularly vivid, especially after a rainstorm. “It is Southern California light,” Carey McWilliams wrote in his book Southern California: An Island on the Land, “and it has no counterpart in the world.” For the powerful work that Jean-Michel was creating, the L.A. light could inject even more energy into his paintings… I’ve always thought that the brilliant blue that Jean-Michel often used in his paintings — a brilliant blue that instantly grabs both your soul and your eyeballs — was the exact blue of the L.A. sky. Take a look at Untitled (L.A. Painting).
So Los Angeles was good for Jean-Michel. He was nurtured and respected, and he was FREEEEEE!
The Holy Grail
Then I walked over to Gallery Two: the re-creation of Jean-Michel’s 57 Great Jones Street studio-home in NoHo in New York City. Shorthand for “North of Houston” Street, the neighborhood was, back in the 1980s, a gritty area in between the East Village and Greenwich Village proper. Jean-Michel rented the studio-home, only a few doors east from an old, red-brick firehouse, from Andy Warhol.
As I entered Gallery Two, there was a wall filled with framed drawings, and, against another wall, there was a large glass case packed with sketchbooks and numerous African carvings and artifacts — Jean-Michel visited Africa in 1986. In the glass case, there was also an invitation for Jean-Michel to attend a lunch with Andy Warhol’s family after Warhol’s funeral in 1987 — Jean-Michel first bonded with Warhol at a lunch, then, not even five years later, said goodbye to Andy forever at a lunch. After I studied all that, I walked into Jean-Michel’s studio — the Holy Grail.
But a lot of people didn’t understand that they had found the Holy Grail. More times than not, they quickly walked through the studio, stopping for a moment or two to look at whatever they were looking at, and then hunted for something else that interested them. But if you really wanted to get a fix on Jean-Michel, or start the process of getting a fix, you’d spend a good thirty minutes, at least, inspecting everything. It was the best space, for the public, to get some kind of handle on Jean-Michel. To understand his influences and work methods and interests and tastes in books and films and so on. It was the Holy Grail!
In the studio, there were piles of books: Howl by Allen Ginsberg; Michelangelo by Charles de Tolnay; Edie by Jean Stein; To Be, or Not… To Bop by Dizzy Gillespie and Al Fraser; The Success and Failure of Picasso by John Berger; The Sculpture of Picasso by Roland Penrose; Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective by the Museum of Modern Art; Hiroshima by John Hersey; Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell; Papillon by Henri Charriere; Black Beauty, White Heat: A Pictorial History of Classic Jazz, 1920–1950 by Frank Driggs & Harris Lewine; Black Hollywood: The Negro in Motion Pictures by Gary Null; Hustlers and Con Men by Jay Robert Nash; City of Angels by Steve Shagan; Dog Years by Gunter Grass; Death in Venice by Thomas Mann; Bird Lives! by Ross Russell; Flash of the Spirit by Robert Farris Thompson; The Last Words of Dutch Schultz by William S. Burroughs; The Complete Poems of Robert Frost ; Man Ray by Roland Penrose; The Art of Cameroon by Tamara Northern; The Devil’s Music: A History of the Blues by Giles Oakley; Black on Black: Commentaries by Negro Americans edited by Arnold Adolf; The Complete Opera Book by Gustav Kobbé; and, among others, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. (Gerard Basquiat also owned books by Orwell and Frost.)
And there were piles of videocassettes: The Breakfast Club; Shane; Amadeus; Pretty in Pink; Nashville; Reds; Seven Samurai; The Graduate; Stalag 17; To Kill a Mockingbird; Paris, Texas; A Solider’s Story; Once Upon a Time in the West; The Big Sleep; The Thing; The Third Man; Beverly Hills Cop; Blackmail; A Passage to India; The Enforcer; Places in the Heart; Days of Heaven; Going Places; The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; and A King in New York, to name a few.
And there were some wine bottles; all kinds of brushes and tubes of paint; several photographs of Los Angeles; many paintings by Jean-Michel; a toy wood gun painted blue; the Summer 1982 issue of The Paris Review; and numerous vinyl records: On Broadway by Tito Puente and His Latin Ensemble; Miles Davis at Carnegie Hall; I’ve Gotta Be Me by Sammy Davis Jr.; The Spirit’s in It by Patti LaBelle; Unforgettable by Nat King Cole; and, among others, Bird on 52nd Street by Charlie Parker, whom Jean-Michel idolized — both Parker and Jean-Michel were prodigies who were determined, at a very young age, to be true to their artistic callings and do things their way.
What do we learn from all these things? In a nutshell, Jean-Michel was a kind of investigator who had an impressive intellect and a ceaseless curiosity about history, science, current events, sports, and the arts. Jean-Michel then shared what he learned through his artwork. It’s like what Steven Worthy, the family friend, said in the video from earlier in the exhibit: art was a “natural communication vehicle for him.”
Or like what Jeffrey Deitch, who became a friend and advisor to Jean-Michel, said at the King Pleasure panel: “He would flip through an anatomy book, a history book, and retain all the images. And then like someone does now with an AI generator, he turned it back into his own unique vision.”
The books especially interested me. Jean-Michel obviously had an affinity for the Beats, a group of anti-establishment writers from the 1950s. Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and William S. Burroughs’s The Last Words of Dutch Schultz showed up in the Studio-Holy Grail at King Pleasure, and one of Jean-Michel’s favorite books was The Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac. So Jean-Michel, who actually met Ginsberg and Burroughs at a dinner on December 20, 1986, dug the Beats.
The Beats probably grabbed Jean-Michel’s mind-spirit in a number of ways. First, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and the other Beats were always on the search for truth or enlightenment or holiness — and they thought mainstream American society could never give them any of that. So they broke away from the mainstream, pointing out its flaws when needed, and took another path. For Jean-Michel, the Beats’ way of thinking and living probably seemed right and true and perfect — nearly or completely.
Second, Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac had fun with words, and that fun was interesting and thought-provoking and innovative. Jean-Michel used words in his paintings the exact same way.
And third (though there’s probably more), Kerouac and Jean-Michel loved jazz. Kerouac even wanted to write like a jazz musician. In the opening note for Mexico City Blues, he wrote: “I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on Sunday.” Jean-Michel, with his painterly riffs, melodies, and feeling, was a kind of jazz painter.
While it’s believed that Jean-Michel took cues from Burroughs’s “cut-up” technique for how he used words in his paintings, Howl may be another literary influence. Ginsberg’s critique of American society and inventive wordplay conjures up something deep and profound within a reader, taking a firm grip of one’s mind-spirit. Jean-Michel carried out similar critiques and wordplay in his artworks — with the same effect.
Ginsberg’s Howl: “The lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago”
Basquiat’s 363 B of Iron: “The kangaroo woman that makes the rain”
Ginsberg’s Howl: “The narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism”
Basquiat’s Tuxedo: “Train tracks built for chump change of 1850 by men of China”
Ginsberg’s Howl: “Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!”
Basquiat’s Eroica I: “Eroica Eroica Eroica Eroica Eroica”
There are many other examples.
And we can’t forget Howl’s opening line — widely acknowledged as one of the great opening lines of any poem in modern history: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…” It’s something that Jean-Michel, on multiple levels, could relate to.
As for The Subterraneans, the book was a kind of companion for Jean-Michel. He reportedly traveled with it everywhere, and there’s a famous picture of him clutching a well-worn copy of the novel as if someone is threatening to take it away.
I couldn’t find an interview in which Jean-Michel explains his love for the book, but even if a journalist had asked, he probably wouldn’t have said much — it’s the kind of thing he may have wanted to keep private. So we can only guess why The Subterraneans was a touchstone for Jean-Michel.
The novel is a semi-fictional account of Kerouac’s brief, but obviously meaningful relationship with a young Black woman in New York City. For the book, he moves the location to San Francisco and gives her the name of “Mardou Fox.” Kerouac calls himself “Leo Percepied.” The writing is pure Kerouac — always on the go, with all sorts of thoughts, asides, details, and emotions included, similar to jazz. But at its root, The Subterraneans is an examination of Kerouac possibly losing the love his life — and he fears he may never find that kind of person again. He appears to be working through that real-life realization by writing about it.
Since it’s hard to know why Jean-Michel connected with the book, I’ll go into what grabbed me when I read it in my twenties. Maybe something will match up with Jean-Michel, who read it in his twenties.
First of all, the language is exciting, with Kerouac paying little attention to the so-called “rules” of writing. He’s saying, in a way, it’s okay to experiment and be true to one’s artistic vision. It’s inspiring for any young writer or artist, especially one who sees things differently.
There’s also a lot happening: love, jealousy, drunkenness, art, literature, jazz, sexuality, confusion of sexuality or curiosity of sexuality (for Kerouac’s character), depression, hangovers, more love, more jealousy, the confusion of love, lost love, craziness, lies, deceit, beauty, bohemia, San Francisco. And Kerouac writes about it all with ferocity and honesty and tenacity, never letting up and pulling you into his crazed, jealous, drunken, hungover, love-sick mind.
The book is a major head trip. It forces you to read it a certain way if you want to get something from it. And if you don’t read it that way, or if you’re incapable of reading it that way, you won’t get anything from it. You have to, in a sense, obey Kerouac and read it without letting up, without even thinking about what you’re reading. You just have to keep reading the words and enter Kerouac’s mind and go with his flow and hope something sticks. Maybe the answers will come after you finish reading it.
That was all mind-blowing stuff for a twenty-one-year-old college student who didn’t want to be any kind of writer, but an outlaw writer. It got me thinking differently about ways to live and write and communicate. Maybe Jean-Michel, a kind of outlaw artist, had a similar experience with the book.
Or maybe he was mostly into the specific language of The Subterraneans. Here’s one passage from the book: “…the interchanges of statement, the levels of waving intimation, the smile in sound, the same living insinuation in the way her sister’d arranged those wires wriggled entangled and fraught with intention…”
It reminds me of Jean-Michel’s poetic reading, boomed over a speaker, at the start of King Pleasure: “Breathing into his lungs, the dust of life, 2,000 years before asbestos. Nicotine homeboy walks on eggshells, very much medicated, much medicated.”
That passage from The Subterraneans also reminds me of something you’d read on Jean-Michel’s paintings.
Reading The Subterraneans now, a number of questions pop up that I wish I could ask Jean-Michel. Mardou Fox, Kerouac’s lover, was a beautiful, intense, intelligent Black woman who found herself moving through a mostly white artistic scene, bored with that scene, and struggling with mental health issues and a troubled, alcoholic boyfriend (Percepied/Kerouac). Did Jean-Michel feel a connection to Fox? Was he learning something from her? Or was Jean-Michel learning something from Kerouac’s relentless self-examination in the book? Maybe he was getting answers or artistic inspiration from Jack? The tenacity, ferocity, and truth-telling of Jack. The insistence that the reader must let go and obey Kerouac if he or she wants anything from the book. (And maybe that’s the way to approach Jean-Michel’s paintings?) Exactly what was Jean-Michel getting from The Subterraneans that made him want to read it over and over?
And that goes for the other books in Jean-Michel’s studio.
What did he get from To Be, or Not… To Bop, the exhaustive autobiography of jazz great Dizzy Gillespie? What did he get from Dog Years, a novel by Gunter Grass about the Nazi era and its aftermath in Germany? What did he get from Hiroshima, a nonfiction book by John Hersey that chronicles the day that America dropped the atomic bomb on Japan? What did he get from Hustlers and Con Men, a historical book by Jay Robert Nash about the top con artists in America and points beyond? What did he get from Edie, an oral history by Jean Stein about Edie Sedgwick, one of Andy Warhol’s superstars from the 1960s, who died from a drug overdose when she was twenty-nine? What did he get from Down and Out in Paris and London, a memoir of sorts by George Orwell about poverty and the tramp’s life?
What did he get from Gray’s Anatomy, the book his mother gave him as he recuperated from getting hit by a car? Jean-Michel was only seven years old, and he was handed a thick, heavy book that’s more than 1,200 pages long and packed with anatomical drawings. Could he read at that age? If so, what was he thinking when he read something like: “The Flexor carpi radials lies on the inner side of the preceding muscle. It arises from the internal condyle by the common tendon, from the fascia of the forearm, and from the intermuscular septa between it and the Pronator radii teres, on the outside, the Palmaris longus internally, and the Flexor sublimis digtorum beneath.” Or did he just look at the illustrations of human organs and body parts?
And there was the Summer 1982 issue of The Paris Review in Jean-Michel’s studio. It featured interviews with the poets Philip Larkin, an Englishman who also worked as a librarian, and James Merrill, an American who won the Pulitzer Prize. Was Jean-Michel, a poet of sorts, getting something from them? (Larkin and Jean-Michel actually shared a bit of a stammer and a reluctance to deal with the media. Larkin conducted his interview with The Paris Review through the mail.)
Most importantly, what did he get from Bird Lives! The High Life & Hard Times of Charlie (Yardbird) Parker by Ross Russell and Flash of the Spirt: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy by Robert Farris Thompson? Both books were essential reading for Jean-Michel. He even gave the Parker book to friends, as if he was saying, ‘Read this, and you’ll understand me.’
I haven’t seen it mentioned a lot by critics and journalists — they tend to focus on Jean-Michel’s love of jazz and hip hop — but the books in the Studio-Holy Grail show he had a keen, literary mind that bubbled with curiosity. So why is the intellectual side of Jean-Michel overlooked? Why is his mind too often ignored? We can chalk it up to some malignant form of racism, but maybe the critics and journalists have been too lazy or too unequipped or too superficial to even consider Jean-Michel’s mind. I don’t know, but it bothers me… because his mind was first-rate.
It’s actually a slight that Jean-Michel faced going back to the ’80s. A telling anecdote comes from Lenore and Herbert Schorr, good friends of Jean-Michel and proud collectors of his work — they were so close that Jean-Michel reportedly asked Herb to be his art dealer.
Now Herb is very smart. He earned a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton; he was a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at Cambridge University; he became an assistant professor at Columbia University; he swiftly rose through the ranks of IBM, landing the job of vice president of Product and Service Planning for the Advanced Systems Development Division; he was a vice president at Systems Laboratory; he became executive director of the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California; and the list of high achievements rolls on.
So when Lenore and Herb were living in New York, they started collecting Jean-Michel’s work and got to know him. In 2014 for Vanity Fair, Ingrid Sischy revealed this nugget:
From today’s perspective, with a black American president in his second term, and an art world vibrant with the successes of a host of extraordinary black artists — Glenn Ligon, Wangechi Mutu, David Hammons, Kara Walker, Mark Bradford, Steve McQueen… the list could fill this page — the lonely battle that Basquiat and a few black artists before him waged against both blatant and covert racism seems all the more vivid. The Schorrs don’t mince words about the kinds of things they used to hear in championing the young artist. Herb would tell people Basquiat was brilliant. “You mean street-smart?” he’d be asked. “No, I mean brilliant,” Herb would reply.
Herb wasn’t alone in thinking that. Jeffrey Deitch said at the King Pleasure panel that Basquiat, who could speak Spanish, French, and English, had a “tremendously powerful intelligence” with a photographic memory.
“He would recall some snippets of conversation that we had three years previously,” said Deitch. “He remembered everything. And that’s so much a part of the work.”
When Larry Gagosian first met Jean-Michel, he instantly realized the same thing as Deitch and Herb.
“He was extremely intelligent,” Gagosian said at the King Pleasure panel. “I could see that immediately. Just the way he handled himself. He’s twenty or twenty-one years old, and he was poised. He struck me as a very intelligent person.”
Gagosian added, unequivocally: “He was a genius.”
The Old Guard Weaponizes Jean-Michel
Now let’s bring in Robert Hughes, the longtime art critic for TIME magazine, and Hilton Kramer, the one-time chief art critic for The New York Times… and let’s bring in critic Vivien Raynor, too. Disregarding his mind, Hughes, Kramer, and Raynor all pushed the crooked notion that Jean-Michel was nothing more than an art-world mascot.
Between 1984 and 1985, Raynor promoted that rotten idea in two articles for The New York Times, the nation’s paper of record, using the actual term “art-world mascot.” Suspiciously, she failed to explain exactly what an art-world mascot was. (Raynor’s malicious New York Times review of a Warhol-Basquiat show in September 1985 triggered a fallout between Andy and Jean-Michel.)
As for Kramer, he always maintained, before and after Basquiat’s death, that Jean-Michel was merely the darling (re: art-world mascot) of white liberals.
In 1982, Kramer told CBS, “The art world, which is full of liberal, left-wing types, was feeling that they needed to make a bow in that direction: the disadvantaged, minorities, and so on… (Jean-Michel’s) contribution to art is so minuscule as to be practically nil.”
Then in 1998, in The Wall Street Journal, Kramer wrote: “Even more important was the fact that Basquiat was black… for the white liberal taste makers in the downtown art scene jumped at the prospect of launching their first black superstar.”
And, in 1984, Robert Hughes wrote what he called a “satire in heroic couplets,” titled “The SoHoiad.” It was a cover story for The New York Review of Books — a kind of house organ for the New York intellectual-arts establishment — that came off as a bitter rant against Jean-Michel and other young artists. NYRB editors obviously didn’t like the new crowd either.
Hughes gave Jean-Michel the name “Jean-Michel Basketcase,” and strongly suggested that he was nothing more than an art-world mascot. Here’s a section:
Our purblind virtuosi now embrace
KEITH BORING, and JEAN-MICHEL BASKETCASE.
The spraycans hiss, the ghetto-blaster shrieks,
Above the clamour, DODO GRUESOME speaks:
“My pa-in-law became a millionaire
From unguents to straighter Negroes’ hair:
A generation later, I have to come
To bring a new cosmetic to the slum.
In this fat piping time of cultural plenty
Art sheds its bloom when it is over twenty:
Whiteness is staleness: connoisseurs, behold
Th’apotheosis of the Twelve-Year-Old!
My Noble Savages, on sneakered feet,
Flock to the doors of Fifty-Seventh Street;
The infant dauber, whom MAYOR KOCH appalls,
Now sprays on Belgian Flax instead of walls;
The matrons twitter and the Cash-Bell rings,
I serve Hawaiian Punch and Chicken-Wings,
The fame of my inventions spreads afar–
Part day-care center part Bateau-Lavoir.”
Jean-Michel was only twenty-three years old when Hughes and The New York Review of Books came gunning for him. Twenty-three! Imagine what that would have been like for you when you were twenty-three. You’re trying to get your career going, you’re trying to find your footing as a young adult in an increasingly unhinged world, and then one of the most influential art critics in the world, along with the house organ for the New York intellectual-arts establishment, takes dead aim at you and… pulls the trigger?! You probably wouldn’t know how to handle it. You’d be shocked, confused, devastated.
In 1988, only months after Jean-Michel’s passing, Hughes again rolled out the art-world mascot angle in “Requiem for a Featherweight,” another mean rant that was published, this time, in The New Republic.
“For the truth about this prodigy was rather less edifying,” he wrote about Jean-Michel. “It was a tale of a small, untrained talent caught in the buzz saw of art-world promotion, absurdly overrated by dealers, collectors, and, no doubt to their future embarrassment, by critics. This was partly because Basquiat was black. The otherwise monochrome Late American Art Industry felt a need to refresh itself with a touch of the ‘primitive.’”
And, in 1992, Hughes trotted out the art-world mascot slam in a TIME magazine review, titled “The Purple Haze of Hype,” of a Basquiat retrospective. He wrote that certain people in the art world “loaded [Jean-Michel] with more money than he knew what to do with and more praise than he could handle; the art market, like the ceiling of the Emperor Elagabalus, opened and smothered him in tons of roses.” Hughes added that Jean-Michel was “made a cult figure by a money-glutted, corrupt and wholly promotional art-marketing system.”
Hughes, Kramer, and Raynor, who have all passed away, understood that what they were doing could kill Jean-Michel’s career… and damage his post-death reputation. I don’t know if they understood this, but they were also attempting to kill Jean-Michel’s expression of his truest self.
It was as if Hughes, Kramer, and Raynor were trying to assassinate Jean-Michel, in public, with their words — and then Hughes and Kramer wanted to pound the final spikes into his coffin after his passing. They were cold-blooded and brutal, even violent with their words since their intention wasn’t to merely critique but to cause harm. And they were doing it all, using the weight of their publications and their prominent standings in intellectual-arts circles, to a kid only in his twenties who was just starting his career. They were worse than bullies — they were, in fact, assassins.
Which brings up a couple of important questions: Why did these heavyweights within the intellectual-arts establishment use the same “art-world mascot” angle? And why did they keep going on and on about it?
One could make the case that they were simply racists — that they were purely going after Jean-Michel because of the color of his skin, with no other motive than that. It seemed to me, though, that something else was going on, but was no less racist.
Over the past twenty-seven years, as a battle-tested investigative journalist and housing justice activist, I’ve taken on a California governor, two Los Angeles mayors, a Los Angeles police chief, a billionaire friend of Bill Clinton’s, and numerous real-estate tycoons and their high-priced political strategists. In other words, I’ve fought and engaged — intellectually and spiritually — America’s political-corporate establishment up-close and personal.
I’ve also traveled around the world — Mexico, South Africa, Uganda, India, China, Ukraine, Russia, and many more places — and saw that crooked, hard-hearted leaders work pretty much the same everywhere. I also saw the brutal, even lethal, results caused by those ruthless leaders, who always try to divide and conquer the public to grab power and then expand it. (They also engage rivals not by holding logical, respectful debates, but by insulting them and ramping up the public’s emotion.)
So from years of personal experience, I have a unique handle on the twisted, self-serving minds of a certain breed of powerful people — and how they operate. It took time and numerous defeats to understand them, but I finally figured it out. Yet it’s something that’s hard to get people to fully grasp if they haven’t gone through the same vicious battles — and if they want to cling, as a kind of coping mechanism, to the myths and misinformation that the powerful push. I’m going to try anyway.
For one thing, the “art-world mascot” slam wasn’t a coincidence — and it wasn’t a collective act of stupid, obsolete minds… Hughes, Kramer, and Raynor were smart, savvy people who climbed to the top of the art-critic ladder.
Something I’ve learned is that the powerful and their lackeys (i.e. Hughes, Kramer, and Raynor) don’t do anything by accident… and they aren’t stupid, even when they look idiotic. In fact, when smart, powerful people do something that looks REALLY stupid, they’re actually tipping their hands that they’re up to something. Because there’s no way they could be THAT stupid. Get it?
What’s really happening is that they seem stupid because what they’re doing makes no sense to us. But behind the scenes, among the powerful and their lackeys, it makes perfect sense — they’re usually carrying out some self-serving scheme to keep the powerful in power and to help the rich get richer… it almost always comes down to money and power.
So the powerful and their lackeys may look and sound incompetent, but they’re not — they’re trying to help themselves, not us. I think all that can apply to Hughes, Kramer, and Raynor. They were NOT stupid, and they knew exactly why they were attacking Jean-Michel.
At first, I thought that Hughes, Kramer, and Raynor believed Jean–Michel was a threat — and that was why they attacked him. That a young, charismatic, wildly talented, and, in Herb Schorr’s words, “brilliant” Black man was starting to democratize the art world — and certain powerful people in the art-world establishment wanted that quashed. Because huge sums of money and all kinds of power were at stake, and the powerful didn’t want the “riffraff” to get in on the action, taking away that money and power. And, as good lackeys for the powerful in the art-world establishment, Hughes, Kramer, and Raynor did their racist dirty work: to put an end to Jean-Michel’s democratization of the art world… kind of like the violent demise of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. And I thought Hughes, Kramer, and Raynor had their own agendas: the artworks of Jean-Michel and other young artists were too difficult or different for them to comprehend and explain… other critics were doing a good job of comprehending and explaining them… Hughes, Kramer, and Raynor worried about becoming irrelevant as critics… and that could impact their livelihoods — and their reason for being. So they also had personal reasons to go after Jean-Michel.
It’s not bad, but I thought about it more, and it didn’t totally jibe. There was some kind of truth to it, and I thought I was close, but something else seemed to be happening. So I kept trying to figure it out — mulling it over and over in my mind, writing outlines, reading articles and books. Finally, three things kept popping up: (1) In the 1980s, a war had broken out in the art world between the “Old Guard” and, what I call, the “New Money-New Power”; (2) Jean-Michel got dragged into the middle of that war; and (3) the larger reason for the racism directed at Jean-Michel was the war between the Old Guard and the New Money-New Power. For me, those three points were rock solid.
Now what follows may seem like a stretch to some people, but I’m confident there’s a truth to it — and that truth is ugly.
We should go back to Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word — the same Tom Wolfe who wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities. The Painted Word was first published as an essay, in 1975, at Harper’s Magazine. It was published as a book that same year. Guess who appeared on page two? Hilton Kramer.
Wolfe essentially took Kramer and other critics to task for their outsized influence in the art world — and their notion that art is not art if a theory isn’t attached to it. That put a lot of power into the hands of the people who came up with the theories: the intellectual-arts establishment, which included Robert Hughes and Hilton Kramer.
Wolfe also estimated that, in addition to artists, there were only 10,000 “souls” calling the shots and participating in the international art world. That was an estimate taken a mere five years before Jean-Michel came into the art-world scene in 1980. So in all likelihood, if you believe that number, it hadn’t grown too much between 1975 and 1980.
Wolfe then explained things further with three main points: “(1) the art world is a small town; (2) part of the small town, le monde, always looks to the other, bohemia, for the new wave and is primed to believe in it; (3) bohemia is made up of cénacles, schools, coteries, circles, cliques. Consequently, should one cénacle come to dominate bohemia, its views might very well dominate the entire small town (a.k.a. ‘the art world’).” In Wolfe’s use of “cénacles,” he’s referring to groups of critics and perhaps art historians — literary groups.
With that, I’m going to take things in another direction… Like any small town, people grab for turf and status, which give them money and power. Those same people want things done a certain way so they can maintain their turf-status-money-power, and they don’t want outsiders to come in and take over their turf-status-money-power. Those people, who want to maintain their turf-status-money-power, are, what I call, the “Old Guard.” That’s how a small town works. There’s always an Old Guard operating somewhere, hoarding turf, status, money, and power. The small town-art world of Wolfe’s time was no different.
Now if you go back and read articles from the 1980s about the New York art world, there was a lot of hand-wringing over the New Money-New Power — a growing group of new wealthy collectors, new powerful art dealers, new artists, a new breed of art critic, and I’m probably missing a few others, like new art advisors.
As early as 1981, Kramer fired a warning shot about the New Money-New Power with an essay titled the “The New Scene,” writing that “there is a price to be paid for all this frenzy and hubbub. There usually is for success on this scale. The atmosphere of hucksterism, the confusion of values, the manufacture of false reputations, the spawning of instant ‘movements’ and carefully orchestrated ‘trends’ — the whole tendency of the art world to adopt ‘show-biz’ or ‘network’ tactics in the promotion of its wares and services is deeply disturbing to many experienced observers of the scene.”
He added: “Economic prosperity always brings its share of excesses and abuses, and the art world is certainly not immune to them.” (The essay can be found in Kramer’s book The Revenge of the Philistines, a collection of his writings between 1972 and 1984.)
A few years later, Hughes wrote “The Sohoiad” for The New York Review of Books. While the so-called “satire” went after Jean-Michel, Keith Haring, Julian Schnabel, and new artists in general, it was also an angry rant about the New Money-New Power. I don’t even know which section to choose because the whole thing is off the charts, but here’s one passage from the version on the NYRB website:
Who are the patrons whose indulgent glance
The painter craves, for whom the dealers dance?
Expunge, young Tyro, the excessive hope
Of gathering crumbs from Humanist or Pope:
No condottiere holds his exigent sway
Like MONTEFELTRO upon West Broadway –
Instead, mild stockbrokers with blow-dried hair
Stroll through the soukh, and passive snuff the air.
Who are the men for whom this culture burgeons?
Tanned regiments of well-shrunk Dental Surgeons,
With leather-swaddled spouses, minds obtuse,
And ALDO GUCCI’s stirrups on their shoes,
Whose hope is to endow their own museum
With works of art, before they’ve learned to see ‘em.
Yet count these dolts superior to the misers
Primping beneath the name of Art Advisors,
Dragging bewildered clients by the nose
Down Spring Street, through the lofts and studios.
And on and on Hughes went. He even threw jabs at art critics Rene Ricard and Peter Schjeldahl, who championed new artists.
Another example of the hand-wringing is The New York Times Magazine article about Jean-Michel from 1985. Titled “New Art, New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist,” the reporter, Cathleen McGuigan, immediately went into how “dealers refined their marketing strategies” and how an “ever-increasing pool of collectors in the United States, Europe, and Japan” was coming into the art world and how the “upwardly mobile postwar generation, raised on art-history courses and summer trips to Europe, aspires to collect and has the cash to do it.” The article wasn’t just about Basquiat — it was about the New Money-New Power. In fact, Jean-Michel ended up disliking the article because he believed McGuigan gave the New Money-New Power too much credit for his success. “As though I didn’t do it myself,” he said in Vanity Fair.
In 1988, Robert Hughes did more hand-wringing. In “Requiem for a Featherweight,” he not only attacked Jean-Michel, but he also took aim at the New Money-New Power. I brought up the following section earlier, but it’s worth another look.
Hughes wrote, “It was a tale of a small, untrained talent caught in the buzz saw of art-world promotion, absurdly overrated by dealers, collectors, and, no doubt to their future embarrassment, by critics.”
So he was not just taking shots as Jean-Michel, but also the New Money-New Power — read the full article and it clearly comes off that way.
Those are just a few examples. There are many, many more. The people doing the most hand-wringing were either part of the Old Guard or taking their cues from Old Guard stalwarts such as Hughes and Kramer, two of the top art critics in the United States.
And in America, as we all know, money equals power. And the more money you make, the more power you can grab — if you want it. Hughes, Kramer, and Raynor — members of high standing within the Old Guard — understood this. So did other players in the Old Guard. They were smart people, and they could read the tea leaves, as it were. They all understood that the New Money-New Power was coming for their turf, status, and power in the small town-art world — and the riches that come with having prime turf, high status, and lots of power. They also understood that the ever-expanding New Money-New Power would be nearly impossible to fend off, and that the small town-art world, as the Old Guard had known and ruled it, would no longer exist.
Now we get into the real ugliness.
Just like any war or political race, there’s always a propaganda campaign attached to it. Both sides of a war or political race are trying to win over the hearts and minds of the public for complete and total victory. It’s the same in the war between the Old Guard and New Money-New Power.
The Old Guard was losing battles on numerous fronts in its war against the New Money-New Power. BUT, feeling compelled to do something, the Old Guard could at least roll out a devastating propaganda campaign. And the Old Guard chose Jean-Michel to be the poster boy for everything that they believed was wrong and corrupt about the New Money-New Power. Why Jean-Michel? He was an easy, and useful, target.
In fact, in 1993, in an article about a Basquiat retrospective at the Whitney Museum, Robert Storr, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, told the Los Angeles Times, “People deal with him as a symbol of the (1980s) period rather than as an artist. And the people who hate that period use him as an easy target.”
So I’m not alone in thinking that.
(That L.A. Times article, by the way, quoted a nasty take on Jean-Michel by Hilton Kramer and used a headline that regurgitated Old-Guard talking points: “Basquiat Retrospective: Well-Earned or Hype? Four years after his death, a Whitney show raises questions: Is this a look at a productive career? Or a new spin on a dubious phenomenon?”)
But it’s more than just hate for a period: turf, status, money, and power were at stake for the Old Guard, including the demise of the small town-art world.
Why was Jean-Michel an easy, useful target? He was young and, as a result, inexperienced in the ways that the art world operated — even Jean-Michel conceded that in a 1986 interview that ended up in Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, the 2010 documentary by his friend Tamra Davis. He was also Black. That was key for the Old Guard, believing Jean-Michel’s Blackness would be a valuable weapon to use against the New Money-New Power.
In other words, in its propaganda campaign against the New Money-New Power, the Old Guard hoped to capitalize on the racist attitudes of the general public and whoever else to keep their power. A classic case of divide and conquer, hurling insults and ramping up emotion. It was ugly — and racist.
This is not a stretch.
First, the war between the Old Guard and the New Money-New Power was playing out during the Ronald Reagan era of the 1980s — a time when certain “leaders” were pushing the filthy ideas that poor is bad, gay is sinful, and Black is frightful. So there was a bigoted vibe of that time that perfectly suited the Old Guard’s strategy.
And using a person of color or a minority of some kind as a bigoted, divisive propaganda weapon is nothing new. George H.W. Bush rolled out Willie Horton, a Black man and convicted murderer, in TV ads to win votes for his 1988 presidential run — banking on fear and racist attitudes to snatch him a victory. President George W. Bush did something similar, many years later, in 2004: he used an anti-same sex marriage stance (in other words, he banked on fearful, anti-LGBTQ+ attitudes of voters) to win re-election. The Old Guard was carrying out the same bigoted, fear-drenched propaganda campaign: using Jean-Michel, a Black man, to beat back the New Money-New Power.
Leading the charge of the Old Guard’s propaganda offensive was Hughes and Kramer, who were losing some of their turf, status, and power to the new art dealers and new art advisors and new critics who applauded the new artists. Their propaganda, on the behalf of the Old Guard, went this way: Basquiat has no talent, but he is Black, and the New Money-New Power has decided that an untalented Black kid should become an art-world superstar, which is proof that the New Money-New Power is out of control, has no taste, and is destroying the High Standards and Sacred Traditions of Art and the Art World, which obviously means that the New Money-New Power must be stopped!
Then only weeks after Hughes published “The Sohoiad” on March 29, 1984, Vivien Raynor came into play by fine-tuning Hughes and Kramer’s propaganda by adding the term “art-world mascot.” That happened on May 11, 1984, when Raynor wrote, in The New York Times, that Jean-Michel has “a chance of becoming a very good [painter], as long he can withstand the forces that would make of him an art-world mascot.” It was a propaganda masterstroke: Raynor came up with a catchy, and concise, put-down to use against Jean-Michel (and the New Money-New Power) that reeked of illegitimacy.
The next year, Raynor upped the ante by officially anointing Jean-Michel, in the nation’s paper of record, an “art-world mascot” — and she placed a large chunk of the blame on those undefined “forces,” which people in the know understood to be the New Money-New Power.
In a September 20, 1985, review about the Warhol-Basquiat collaboration, in The New York Times, Raynor opened with this left hook: “Last year, I wrote of Jean-Michel Basquiat that he had a chance of becoming a very good painter providing he didn’t succumb to the forces that would make him an art-world mascot. This year, it appears that those forces have prevailed, for Basquiat is now onstage at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery at 163 Mercer Street, doing a pas de deux with Andy Warhol, a mentor who assisted in his rise to fame.”
(Raynor was truly a piece of work… she never explained what an “art-world mascot” was in her articles; she never explained who those “forces” were; she gave Warhol waaaaaaay too much credit for Jean-Michel’s success; she routinely reported his wrong age; she misspelled his first name; and she couldn’t even get the facts straight about his parents, whom she reported were both Haitian. When a critic makes that many mistakes, you know something isn’t right — a critic with no agenda cares about the truth. Hughes didn’t care about the truth, either. In “Requiem for a Featherweight,” he incorrectly reported that Jean-Michel was solely of Haitian descent and an “upper-middle-class, private-school boy.” Here’s the truth: When Jean-Michel was just a kid, between 1967 and 1971, he attended Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn, then went from public school to public school, ran away to Manhattan with no home waiting for him, struggled mightily to make ends meet as he strived to be an artist, and, because of the color of his skin, constantly dealt with racism in all its forms. Jean-Michel was not a privileged private-school boy.)
With Hughes, Kramer, and Raynor weighing in, mindless, establishment-minded reporters and critics, who looked to Hughes, Kramer, and Raynor for explanations about the state of the art world, repeated their propaganda. And the propaganda turned into the Official Take on Jean-Michel Basquiat — and on the New Money-New Power.
I’ve seen that kind of thing happen all the time in my activism work. Mindless, establishment-minded reporters can’t figure things out for themselves, so they take cues from a handful of journalists who they consider to be the best in covering the housing beat — and those journalists write for major publications such as The New York Times or Los Angeles Times. But those big-shot journalists usually write from the point of view of the establishment-real estate industry, spreading its propaganda to the mindless reporters, who then send it out to the general public. It’s a power-establishment loop that always results in bad things for the rest of us.
It’s also important to point out that agendas, among the rich and powerful, don’t need to align perfectly. All that matters is that they’ve come to realize that they have a common enemy — and they agree that their common enemy must be crushed. So Old Guard critics Hughes and Kramer will do something for one reason, Old Guard collectors will do something for another reason, and Old Guard museum directors will do something for a third reason, but they’re all in agreement that their turf-status-money-power must be protected, at all costs, against the unrelenting advancements of the New Money-New Power. If that means rolling out Jean-Michel as a racist weapon against the New Money-New Power, so be it. Not only will no one in the Old Guard stand up in protest, they’ll also repeat the lies.
Here’s a real-life example of Old Guard players aligning with each other — it’s really incredible. So Lenore and Herb Schorr repeatedly tried to donate Basquiat paintings to museums, including the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Schorrs thought it would be a good thing for Jean-Michel. What did the Old Guard museum directors do? They told Lenore and Herb to buzz off. In The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Fred Hoffman wrote that MoMA told the Schorrs that “having a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat was not even worth the cost of storage.” Read that again. That sounds a lot like Hilton Kramer, right? A lot like Kramer’s sucker punch that Jean-Michel’s “contribution to art is so minuscule as to be practically nil.” So there was alignment going on between Kramer and the Museum of Modern Art. And MoMA looks so incredibly stupid now, and we know they can’t be that stupid, that the museum almost definitely had some kind of backroom agenda involving turf-status-money-power. Such a high degree of “stupidity” nearly assures it. (Larry Gagosian also offered a Basquiat painting to MoMA as a gift, and he, too, was turned down.)
I should add that the New Money-New Power could be just as cutthroat towards Jean-Michel as the Old Guard. The New Money-New Power was not pure and clean. But that shouldn’t be surprising: going back to the start of the “art world,” in the 19th century or so, it has always been filled with bigots, thieves, tyrants, maniacs, and con men of every persuasion. Things have gotten so out of hand that the F.B.I. now operates an Art Crime Team — and it seems as if a week doesn’t go by without Artforum and ARTnews reporting about yet another art-world crook doing something shady. Just recently, in fact, Artforum reported about the ongoing scandal of a bogus Basquiat exhibit at the Orlando Museum of Art.
I actually went to that show. In April 2022, I stumbled upon a New York Times article that reported that the artworks at the exhibit were possibly forged. A few weeks later, in May, I flew to Orlando, Florida, to check it out myself. I arrived at the museum just before the doors opened, and spent the next two and a half hours taking pictures, writing notes, and inspecting the artworks. I couldn’t tell, for sure, if they were real or not, but the fact that everything was painted or drawn on cardboard seemed odd to me — from what I knew, Jean-Michel didn’t use cardboard for drawings and paintings.
By the end of my time at the exhibit, two thoughts popped up in my mind: (1) it could be a kind of get-rich-quick scam because by showing the artworks at a museum, they would be validated and their prices would shoot up, and (2) it would be another example of the con men of the art world trying to make a fast buck off an artist. Jean-Michel was always dealing with those types in the 1980s — and they were still hounding him nearly thirty-four years after his death!
A month after my visit, the F.B.I. Art Crime Team raided the museum, believing the artworks were fake. Then more than a year later, The New York Times reported that the Orlando Museum of Art sued its former director, alleging that he took part in a scheme to use the exhibit as a way to increase the prices of the Basquiat artworks — and he would have gotten a cut from their sale. My hunch was pretty much spot on.
All of that brings up another key point. The Old Guard, including Hughes and Kramer, weren’t defending the High Standards and Sacred Traditions of Art and the Art World by beating back the New Money-New Power, as some people have suggested over the decades. (When Hughes died, in 2012, for example, Fast Company ran a piece titled “Remembering Robert Hughes, The Art World’s Guardian of Rage,” which also used his attacks against Jean-Michel — nearly twenty-four years after Basquiat’s death. And when Kramer passed away, The New York Times hailed him as a “champion of tradition.”) That’s what the Old Guard, including Hughes and Kramer, wanted people to think: they were doing honorable work to save the virtuous small town-art world from the barbarians in the New Money-New Power. But that was just spin, and that lofty, pristine world never existed anyway. (For the record, I don’t think everyone in the art world is a crook. There are obviously lots of smart, upstanding people who have a passion for art and artists.)
The truth of the matter is that the Old Guard was merely trying to stop the New Money-New Power from grabbing more TURF-STATUS-MONEY-POWER. One of the cheap, but effective, ploys that the Old Guard used was wrapping itself in values, morals, and traditions. Sounds familiar, right? That’s how crooked leaders always operate when on the defensive.
Some last notes on Hughes and Kramer… First, I keep going on about them for a very important reason: they are the root sources for the critical attacks that are thrown at Jean-Michel today. Read “Requiem for a Featherweight,” for example, and you’ll see that Hughes essentially laid out all the talking points for future Basquiat bashers, which, I believe, was his intention, especially when he included that essay in his book of collected writings. Just look at the 2012 Fast Company article I mentioned.
Fred Hoffman understood that Hughes and Kramer’s under-handed critiques continued to hound Jean-Michel — and Hoffman is easily one of the top Basquiat experts in the world. In the introduction of his book, which was published in 2017, Hoffman made a point of taking on the evil duo. More diplomatically than me, Hoffman wrote, “While critics such as Robert Hughes and Hilton Kramer dismissed the artist’s paintings as devoid of meaning, I hope by this examination to reveal the depth of his themes, subjects, and insights.” Hoffman knew the score. So whether today’s detractors of Jean-Michel know it or not, they get their ammunition from Hughes and Kramer… and Raynor, too, for that matter.
Second, the thing about Hughes and Kramer is that they wrote a good sentence, and what they wrote seemed to make sense. So when they took aim at Jean-Michel, they could confuse people — because they made decent arguments by writing good sentences. Hughes and Kramer were especially effective among people who can’t, or won’t, think for themselves. Don’t fall for it. Hughes and Kramer were assassins.
Lastly, at the King Pleasure panel, Fred Hoffman said “certain people” in the New York art world weren’t “willing to engage Jean-Michel’s work.” Without naming names, Hoffman was pointing to people like Hughes and Kramer. As far as I could see, and I looked around, Hughes and Kramer NEVER engaged Jean-Michel’s work — that’s a gigantic red flag. Just use Hoffman, Jeffrey Deitch, and Robert Farris Thompson for a comparison. (I’ll get to Thompson in a minute.) They all tried to figure out what Jean-Michel was communicating through the figures and references in his artworks — they were searching for a truth. But what did Hughes and Kramer do? Nothing. In fact, I’ve probably done more digging into Jean-Michel’s artwork than Hughes and Kramer, and I’m not a top-dog, hotshot art critic whose job it is to do that. That’s another big giveaway: the mere fact that Hughes and Kramer NEVER engaged Jean-Michel’s artwork shows that they were pushing an agenda. By their actions, which always matter most, Hughes and Kramer showed they didn’t care about finding the truth — they were only interested in pushing lies-propaganda, using Jean-Michel as a racist weapon, to stop the New Money-New Power. That includes Vivien Raynor.
By the way, Jean-Michel wasn’t a fool. At some point, maybe around 1983, he started to understand, in a real way, that something sinister was going on — it was around this time that he was taking counsel from Andy Warhol. In The Radiant Child interview, for example, Jean-Michel said most people in the art world were “mercenaries,” trying “to make as much money as they can, as fast as they can.” He was figuring things out, but he was still feeling overwhelmed — Fred Hoffman saw that, and so did Julian Schnabel. “I think he was having fun,” Schnabel said in The Radiant Child, “and wanted to have fun, and he didn’t want to get his feelings hurt. And if he just could’ve had a little bit more support, in a deep sense, so he didn’t feel so damn lonely, and didn’t feel so taken advantage of, and gotten so damn confused. He just didn’t have the tools to kind of navigate the sea of shit.”
At the same time, other people who knew Jean-Michel said he was becoming increasingly “paranoid,” and they simply blamed it on his drug addiction. Maybe so. But what they didn’t seem to consider was that the heavy hitters — Old Guard critics, Old Guard museum directors, The New York Review of Books, etc.— were coming after him for reasons he couldn’t fully sort out. That would make you paranoid, too.
Very last note… This entire section I just wrote shows you how incredibly complicated things got for Jean-Michel. I probably killed four billion brain cells trying to figure it out. I can’t imagine what Jean-Michel, who had to steer around all this berserko, racist craziness on a daily basis, went through. Paranoid? Of course!
Power of the Arts
Before I walked out of the Great Jones Street studio, I stopped to watch, for the tenth time, a video of Jean-Michel painting. It was projected on one of the walls, around five minutes long, and what you saw was a couple of stand-out things… First, Jean-Michel worked fast. A stroke here, a stroke there, some more strokes there and here, and then boom, boom, boom… he was done… with maybe a few more edits to come. He had all the books and films and music and current events bubbling inside him, percolating inside him, and he just let it all flow out.
You also saw, and, like I said, I watched the video every time I visited King Pleasure, that Jean-Michel smiled while he painted. I could be wrong, but I swear, at one point, I saw him smiling. Or at least a kind of grin. And he didn’t even seem to know that he was smiling — he looked like he was in a very pleasurable zone. So he enjoyed creating art. It wasn’t merely a job. It was probably life-affirming and soul-quenching and intellectually-stimulating, which brought on the smile. It may explain why he was always painting and creating and consuming books, music, and films: it felt good and, like for many artists, may have soothed him.
At a King Pleasure panel discussion that I attended, Lisane Basquiat, one of the sisters, said that Jean-Michel was probably depressed towards the end of his life. My guess is that he had been depressed longer than that. Here was a sensitive young man, with a powerful, always operating antenna wired into his soul-intellect, who had been run over by a car when he was a kid, had struggled in school, had watched his parents go through a separation, had battled his father over the direction of his life, had essentially been homeless when he was a teenager, was desperate to make it as an artist, was concerned about his mother who was dealing with mental health issues, and was confronted by the mean realities of racism on a regular basis. That’s a lot to shoulder. Along the way, he may have found that art brought some relief.
The power of the arts is real. It can repurpose obsessions, anxieties, and sensitivities in a productive, even awe-inspiring way. But other help may still be needed.
Jeffrey Deitch Says
Then, after the Great Jones Street studio, I walked into a dark hallway where three monitors played a six-minute video of other people talking about Jean-Michel. This section of King Pleasure was good, too. Very important, in fact.
My favorite parts of the video were when Annina Nosei, Jean-Michel’s first art dealer in New York, and Jeffrey Deitch, the friend and advisor to Jean-Michel, explained a few things. Deitch is always great when talking about Jean-Michel, and he was particularly great in this video. (If you ever get a chance to hear Deitch talk about Jean-Michel, stop what you’re doing and listen up. Along with Fred Hoffman and the late Robert Farris Thompson, Deitch is one of the best at explaining why Jean-Michel is so world-class.)
So Deitch said this in the video: “Something that I’ve come to understand is that he was forging this new creative structure, and, so, in his paintings there are images from art history, signs on the side of the street, references to popular culture, cartoons, phrases that he heard somebody say. That if you put them all together in a mix, they wouldn’t necessarily fit. But he had this genius to invent a new kind of syntax that put this all together, that really reflected the contemporary experience.”
I loved that.
Then Nosei said this: “When I looked at the paintings of Jean-Michel, I saw that they were completely different from anybody else. They were really new and unique. Jean-Michel knew everything about art history. The first present that Jean-Michel gave me for my birthday was a little booklet, which he had signed. And the booklet was on Marcel Duchamp. Now tell me. Which graffiti (artist) at 20 years old would know of Marcel Duchamp? No one. Jean-Michel knew everything.”
Loved that, too, although Nosei might have underestimated what graffiti artists knew back in the day… Lee Quinones and Fred Brathwaite, for example, may have something to say about that.
Another great take on Jean-Michel comes from Robert Farris Thompson, a highly respected art history professor at Yale University who wrote Flash of the Spirit: African & Afro-American Art & Philosophy in 1984. Thompson, who died in 2021, wasn’t featured in the videos at King Pleasure, but Jean-Michel respected him and allowed Thompson to visit his studio in New York City. In The Radiant Child, Thompson said this: “His paintings were deliberate enigmas. And they, in effect, said, ‘Get with it! See the complexity of our culture. I’ll give you a few hints.’”
Perfect.
Andy Warhol: A Necessary Detour
King Pleasure didn’t mention Andy Warhol all that much. There were the Warhol portraits of Jean-Michel’s father, mother, and sister; there was the invitation to Jean-Michel to attend a lunch after Warhol’s funeral; there were two notebooks-sketchbooks that Jean-Michel named “Andy Warhol” and “Andy Pt. II”; and there was a picture or two of Warhol in Gallery Four. Unless I missed it, there was nothing else — no exhibit space, for example, examining the friendship and collaboration between Warhol and Jean-Michel. So I’m going to take a detour of sorts to examine some things. It’s important.
Over the years, there’s been a rising, seemingly unquenchable interest in the relationship between Jean-Michel and Warhol. That fascination actually started decades ago, in 1996, when Julian Schnabel explored their friendship-collaboration in the film Basquiat — David Bowie played Warhol and Jeffrey Wright portrayed Jean-Michel. With that movie, the friendship-collaboration was injected into mainstream culture — Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, the popular film critics, gave it two thumbs “waaaay” up.
More recently, other projects have delved into the Basquiat-Warhol connection. In 2021, The Andy Warhol Museum, in Pittsburgh, held an expansive exhibit titled Warhol and Basquiat in Focus: Works from the Permanent Collection. A few months later, in 2022, the friendship-collaboration was featured in the Netflix docuseries The Andy Warhol Diaries. Around the same time, The Collaboration, a play about Jean-Michel and Warhol, was produced in London, and then moved to New York in November 2022. That play was turned into a movie, but it hasn’t been released yet.
Also, throughout the summer of 2023, Jean-Michel and Warhol made international news with a major exhibition at La Fondation Louis Vuitton, in Paris, called Basquiat x Warhol. Painting four hands, featuring more than 100 paintings. In November 2023, that show moved to The Brant Foundation in New York City.
So countless people, all over the world, can’t get enough of Basquiat and Warhol, and for good reason: Jean-Michel and Andy were world-class artists, from different generations, who joined forces to create AMAZING art.
There’s also an appealing backstory: according to legend, before he became a well-known artist, Jean-Michel first approached Warhol at a New York City restaurant to sell him some artsy postcards. But that’s only legend. Their initial encounter may have happened in a completely different way. Warhol, for example, says in his diaries: “[Jean-Michel’s] the kid who used the name ‘Samo’ when he used to sit on the sidewalk in Greenwich Village and paint T-shirts, and I’d give him $10 here and there and send him up to Serendipity to try to sell the T-shirts there. He was just one of those kids who drove me crazy.” So Warhol may have bumped into Jean-Michel before the artsy postcards.
One entry in Warhol’s diaries actually ruins the legend of Jean-Michel’s first chance meeting with Andy. On Saturday, May 5, 1984, Warhol says: “We were walking and got to Washington Square Park where I first met him when he was signing his name as ‘Samo’ and writing graffiti and painting T-shirts.” So according to Warhol, they first ran into each other at Washington Square Park. It’s still an appealing backstory.
What’s not in question is when they first seriously connected — at a lunch on Monday, October 4, 1982. Jean-Michel showed up in a jacket and tie, with paint-splattered boots and a shirt collar fashionably ruffled. At one point, someone snapped a Polaroid of Jean-Michel and Warhol, and Jean-Michel took it and went straight to his studio. An hour or two later, at Warhol’s office at 860 Broadway, Andy was looking at a portrait of himself with Jean-Michel, titled Dos Cabezas — or “two heads.” The friendship-collaboration officially kicked off.
Unfortunately, there’s not a huge amount of first-hand source material by Warhol and Jean-Michel to learn more about the friendship-collaboration directly from them. But, there are a few helpful things: a videotaped 1983 interview between Warhol and Jean-Michel for Andy Warhol’s T.V.; a videotaped 1986 interview of Jean-Michel, parts of which appeared in the 2010 documentary The Radiant Child; a full transcript of that 1986 interview from The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader by Jordana Moore Saggese; and The Andy Warhol Diaries, the book by Warhol that was published in 1989.
There’s also a cryptic mention of Warhol in a 2015 reproduction of some of Jean-Michel’s notebooks: “Andy’s trap/ No dice/ Strictly cash/ Piaget watches.” Warhol wore a Piaget watch. And there may be some personal tidbits in Jean-Michel’s notebooks-sketchbooks about Warhol, but, as far as I know, they’ve never been released to the public.
Before I go into that material, I should bring up a few points: (1) Warhol DID NOT make Jean-Michel famous; (2) Jean-Michel WAS NOT Warhol’s assistant; and (3) Warhol DID NOT discover Basquiat. The truth is that Jean-Michel earned success on his own. Any journalist or critic could figure that out by looking at a timeline of Jean-Michel’s career before he started collaborating, in earnest, with Warhol. But certain journalists, critics, and art-world insiders still wanted to give Warhol credit.
In a 1988 interview, for example, the writer Démosthénes Davvetas started saying, “A lot of people attribute your success to the fact that you knew how to gain Andy Warhol’s attention…”
Basquiat interrupted him, angrily shooting back: “I was the one who helped Andy Warhol paint! It had been twenty years since he’d touch a brush. Thanks to our collaboration, he was able to rediscover his relationship to painting.”
Jean-Michel was right.
That brings up something else. No one knows for sure what the friendship-collaboration between Jean-Michel and Warhol was all about. People have speculated and theorized, but both artists were incredibly complicated people who saw the world very differently than most of us — and Jean-Michel and Warhol brought that complexity and different ways of seeing things into their friendship-collaboration, for good and ill.
But after reading Warhol’s diaries five or six times, and after closely studying the ’83 interview between Warhol and Jean-Michel, I do think that they cared for each other. That’s not to say that there weren’t calculations: maybe Andy wanted to be more relevant in the ’80s art world by working with Jean-Michel and maybe Jean-Michel wanted to learn how to deal with the art world by spending time with Andy. But, in the end, it was an authentic friendship-collaboration. Just look at Jean-Michel’s response to Warhol’s death: from all accounts, he was devastated, even inconsolable. One isn’t inconsolable if he or she doesn’t truly care for the other person.
Now we get into the ’83 interview. Snippets of it showed up in The Andy Warhol Diaries, the docuseries, and what came through was a genuine, touchy-feely fondness between Jean-Michel and Warhol. I wanted to see the entire interview, so I reached out to The Andy Warhol Museum, which was more than accommodating. They sent me the full, raw footage of their chat as well as the Andy Warhol’s T.V. episode that Jean-Michel briefly appeared in. I’m going to dive into that stuff now — as far as I know, the full interview hasn’t been written about extensively.
The conversation took place, according to the timestamp on the video, on December 21, 1983 — the day before Jean-Michel’s twenty-third birthday. By that time, Basquiat had already moved into his studio-home at 57 Great Jones Street that Warhol owned. It was filmed for season two, episode nine, of Warhol’s show, which was broadcasted on the Madison Square Garden Network.
The raw footage of the interview, which lasts for nearly twenty-two minutes, opens with Warhol and Jean-Michel laughing — and Andy resting his right arm on Basquiat’s shoulder. Warhol, with his trademark white wig, wears an electric blue sweater with a maroon muffler around his neck. Jean-Michel, without dreadlocks, wears a navy blue or black NYPD sweatshirt over a collared shirt, and looks alert and happy and attractive.
From the get-go, Warhol can’t keep his hands off Jean-Michel, even giving Basquiat a big hug early in the video. At the same time, Jean-Michel makes a point of looking directly into Warhol’s eyes. If you didn’t know Warhol or Basquiat, and you’re a gay man such as myself, you’d think that they’re flirting, with Andy making the most moves. In fact, less than two minutes into the interview, Warhol asks Jean-Michel if he would be his “S.D.”
Jean-Michel giggles and asks, “What’s an S.D.?”
Warhol replies, looking straight into Basquiat’s eyes: “You know what an S.D. is.”
Jean-Michel can only keep giggling, and seems to be trying to figure out what Andy is hinting at.
Warhol: “You know, an S.D. Sugar Daddy.”
Jean-Michel smiles broadly and laughs, but he’s still unable to say anything. Finally, he says, “Wait. I’m too embarrassed.”
Warhol gives a huge grin, then asks why Jean-Michel is embarrassed. Basquiat thinks quickly on his feet, saying: “This is my first time on television.”
But that’s not true. Basquiat was filmed for a TV interview in 1982, and he appeared more than once on Glenn O’Brien’s public-access show, TV Party. I think Jean-Michel was trying to avoid the real reason he was embarrassed — Warhol putting the moves on him. A few moments later, Andy tells Jean-Michel that he’s “the best-looking artist in town.”
All of this is happening with Warhol’s right arm resting on Basquiat’s shoulder. Every now and then, Warhol calls him “sweetheart.”
At one point, Warhol says that his hair is a mess. Now it’s Basquiat’s turn to get touchy-feely. He looks straight at Warhol, then reaches up, with a big smile on his face, to pick a piece of red lint out of Andy’s hair. Warhol seems to take that as an invitation, and gives Jean-Michel another big hug.
The flirtations and physical affection pop up throughout the interview.
At another point, though, Jean-Michel drops a big question on Warhol.
“Are you going to heaven?”
Warhol can only say “ahhhhh.”
Jean-Michel says with a laugh: “It takes you that long to decide?”
Warhol still can’t say anything.
Jean-Michel: “You don’t know, huh? What do you think?”
Warhol: “Well, I thought I was almost gone where we’re sitting right now when I had gotten those two sharp pains from picking up that weight. I thought I was a goner.”
More important than Warhol’s evasive answer is Jean-Michel’s question. Because if he didn’t believe there was a heaven, then he wouldn’t have asked it. The question hints at a spiritual or religious side to Jean-Michel.
Then they talk about eating turkey at Woolworth’s and Warhol hugs him again and Warhol says Jean-Michel is a “new face” on the art scene. He suggests that Basquiat should lie about his age.
“Okay,” says Jean-Michel. “I’m nineteen.”
Warhol sees another opening, saying lustily: “Nineteen. That’s reeeeeallly ripe.”
Jean-Michel immediately shoots Warhol a look, but he’s not laughing. Warhol stares back with a little smile, then quickly changes the subject. Jean-Michel remains quiet, and a sudden awkwardness enters the interview. Then Warhol asks Jean-Michel what’s his favorite color, and Basquiat starts smiling again. “Blue,” he says.
At the same time, throughout most of the interview, Jean-Michel doesn’t want to give too many personal details, even though Warhol seems to know a lot, including Basquiat’s sex life and the making of a hip-hop record.
Warhol: “Oh, do you want to join our record producing company? I want to help produce you.”
Jean-Michel, savvily: “Okay. Sure. We can be partners.”
They shake on it.
It’s around here that Warhol starts talking about art — and the flirty vibe of the interview goes away. Now Jean-Michel is intellectually engaged.
Warhol: “You don’t go to the galleries anymore since you’ve become so well known, do you?”
Jean-Michel: “Not as much as I should, I guess.”
Warhol: “I read in the paper that the Roy Lichtenstein mural is just fabulous.”
Basquiat’s face lights up.
Jean-Michel: “Oh yeah, I haven’t been up there… but I can imagine what it would look like.”
Warhol gets a kick out of the remark.
Warhol: “You can?”
Jean-Michel: “Sort of.”
Basquiat then asks Warhol if he’s angry that Lichtenstein’s artwork goes for more money than his paintings.
Jean-Michel: “Like I’d be mad if in twenty years Keith Haring is $500,000 and I’m only $100,000.”
Warhol: “Oh. I’m not mad. Well, I love their work better than I like my own work.”
Jean-Michel, surprised: “Really?”
Warhol: “Yeah. They’re worth all that. His pictures are beautiful. I like your work better than my work.”
That last remark stuns Jean-Michel, shaking his head in disbelief. At this point, they go into their collaboration.
Warhol: “I mean, I like the way, you know, here we’re doing some work together, and you paint out… you paint me out. Really.”
Basquiat looks around the room — apparently the artworks are in the same place that they’re filming in, which is probably at Warhol’s HQ at 860 Broadway.
Jean-Michel: “Where did I paint you out?”
Warhol: “Everything I’ve done, you’ve painted me out.”
Jean-Michel: “Where?”
They both look around the room.
Jean-Michel, again: “Where?”
Warhol backs off a bit, but they keep talking about art.
This part of the interview is very telling — and shows that anyone who pushed the idea that Jean-Michel was merely Warhol’s protege had no idea what he or she was talking about. Or that person knew exactly what he or she was doing: trying to delegitimize Jean-Michel.
Because anyone who watches this section of the interview can plainly see that Warhol is seeking Jean-Michel’s advice on art — it’s not the other way around. Warhol is bouncing ideas off Jean-Michel, who looks completely comfortable as a sounding board for the world-famous artist.
Warhol to Basquiat: “Well, you know what I thought I was going to do, maybe I thought I’d be doing a blank canvas. You think a blank canvas would be good?”
Jean-Michel: “See what I mean. Yes!”
Warhol: “You know. Just to add on to it. Or maybe, oh, would that be good?”
Basquiat thinks for a second.
Jean-Michel: “At least put a color on it or something.”
Warhol: “Yeah. With a color. Or the frame. But the frame is too corny, isn’t it?”
Jean-Michel: “What do you mean? What kind of frame?”
Warhol: “You know, just do the frame around the whole edge of the picture.”
Jean-Michel: “Oh, like a tuxedo shirt.”
Warhol: “Yeah. Like a tuxedo shirt. Would that be too corny? Or?”
Basquiat thinks for a second.
Warhol: “Other people have done it or…”
Jean-Michel: “I don’t know. Well, you could do whatever you want, can’t you?”
Warhol: “Well, see the two, I mean, ah, ah, well, it has been something that we, I mean, this has to be something really different and exciting and people will really, ah, you know, make it something.”
Jean-Michel, confidently and decisively: “No matter what, they’re going to hate it…”
Warhol: “They’re going to hate it…”
Jean-Michel, wisely: “…Let’s just do what we want to do.”
Warhol: “Oh, okay.”
Jean-Michel: “They’ll just look for reasons to hate it.”
Warhol: “Oh, really?”
Jean-Michel, confidently: “Yeah. Yeah. Just give them (unintelligible). It’s better.”
Warhol: “But you have a negative attitude. You have to have this ‘up’ attitude.”
Jean-Michel: “What do you mean negative attitude?”
Warhol: “I mean, right away you said they’re going to hate it. You have to think they’re going to love it.”
Jean-Michel, thoughtfully: “Yeah. Some people will love it, but… I don’t know. I don’t think people will really see it for what it is, really, in most cases.”
Warhol: “Oh. So in other words, they just like the idea?”
Basquiat loves that and smiles.
Jean-Michel: “Yeah. Yeah. The idea is enough for them. Yeah. You know?”
Warhol: “Oh.”
Jean-Michel: “I think more people will hear about it than even go, to tell you the truth.”
Warhol then switches the topic entirely — maybe he didn’t like the clear-eyed truths that Basquiat was telling — and asks Jean-Michel what he wants to do for his birthday.
That segment of the interview is probably one of the most revealing exchanges between Jean-Michel and Warhol that’s ever been recorded. When it comes to understanding their artistic collaboration, it’s pure, 150 percent gold. Just read it over again. It’s Jean-Michel who has all the confidence and wisdom about art, and it’s Warhol who’s asking for that wisdom.
All in all, the ’83 interview is top-notch source material for understanding the start of the friendship-collaboration — they’re in the same room; they’re talking with each other; they’re enjoying each other’s company; they’re testing each other; they’re getting into art; and they’re showing the various dynamics within the friendship-collaboration. Gold.
(There’s a fascinating passage in Warhol’s book POPism, which was published in 1980. Warhol writes: “I knew that I definitely wanted to take away the commentary of gestures — that’s why I had this routine of painting with rock and roll blasting the same song, a 45 rpm, over and over all day long — songs like the one that was playing the day Ivan came by for the first time, ‘I Saw Linda Yesterday’ by Dickey Lee. The music blasting cleared my head out and left me working on instinct alone. In fact, it wasn’t only rock and roll that I used that way — I’d also have the radio blasting opera, and the TV picture on (but not the sound) — and if all that didn’t clear enough out of my mind, I’d open a magazine, put it beside me, and half read an article while I painted.” It’s fascinating because Jean-Michel worked almost exactly the same way. He drove Annina Nosei crazy, for example, by blasting “Bolero” over and over when he painted at her gallery — and he always had books and magazines nearby as he painted… Jean-Michel even had a TV turned on.)
Then there’s the 1986 interview that ended up in The Radiant Child, the documentary by director Tamra Davis. Jean-Michel met Davis through his work in L.A., and they were around the same age and started hanging out. When Jean-Michel learned that Davis was a film student, he brought up the idea of making a documentary about him. She wasn’t sure if such a project would take off, but they had become friends and she went along with it.
Between 1983 and 1986, Davis was constantly filming Jean-Michel in L.A. The footage actually looks similar to the home movies that Gerard Basquiat shot of his young son, which is a compliment — both exude an intimate fondness for Jean-Michel. And weirdly, or kind of not, Jean-Michel gives the same kinds of looks to Davis in the 1980s that he gave to his father for the home movies in the 1960s — smiling and mugging for the camera and then withdrawing.
So the 1986 interview was done for the documentary, but then Jean-Michel died — and Davis didn’t want to exploit her friend. It was only decades later that she decided the footage had historical importance, and then went through with the film. As a friend, Davis was true-blue.
According to the opening scene of The Radiant Child, Jean-Michel was interviewed at L’Ermitage hotel in Beverly Hills in June 1986 when he was twenty-five years old. It’s one of the best interviews of Jean-Michel. (The 1985 interview with Geoff Dunlop and Sandy Nairne is also very good.) But, you need to know some of his recent history to understand how good it is.
By June 1986, Jean-Michel had been a big name within the international art world for several years. He had lived through the good, the bad, the ugly. So he had obviously learned some tough lessons, such as how to deal with con men, art critics, and art dealers — his hard-earned wisdom clearly comes through in the interview. And since 1983 or so, Jean-Michel had been spending a lot of time with Warhol, constantly calling Andy on the phone, painting with him, traveling with him, going out to nightclubs and restaurants. All of that informed Jean-Michel, too, by the time he talked with Davis. At the same time, he was still only twenty-five — so he had more to learn.
Also, in September 1985, Vivien Raynor called Jean-Michel an “art-world mascot” in The New York Times — and the war between the Old Guard and the New Money-New Power was raging, with Jean-Michel dragged into the middle of it. And The New York Times Magazine cover story about Jean-Michel and the New Money-New Power had been published in February 1985. So all of those things informed his answers in the 1986 interview.
Davis later said that Jean-Michel was in a great mood when they talked in ’86. That would make sense — he had left all the craziness in New York and could hang out with his friends in L.A. and feel safe and have fun. As Fred Hoffman put it, Los Angeles was Jean-Michel’s “relief valve.”
The interview takes place inside Jean-Michel’s hotel room. He sits on a brown, flower-patterned sofa and wears gray jeans with a long-sleeve, red T-shirt or sweatshirt. He looks happy and relaxed and unguarded. Jean-Michel is the only person in the frame, and Becky Johnston, a mutual friend, and Tamra Davis ask questions off-camera. They talk for around an hour.
Johnston, who’s clearly done her research and later became a screenwriter, starts things off by asking about Jean-Michel’s childhood. He gives a lot of information that I’ve already covered, but he does mention that he was usually friends with the kids who didn’t really have friends. Interesting.
At one point, Johnston brings up Jean-Michel’s “SAMO” period — when he was writing street poetry-philosophy all over downtown New York as a teenager in the late ’70s.
“Did you have an idea that you wanted to hit the gallery circuit?” she asks.
“I was more interested in attacking the gallery circuit at that time,” he replies. “I didn’t think about doing painting — I was thinking about making fun of the paintings that were in there, more than making paintings. The art was mostly Minimal when I came up and it sort of confused me a little bit. I thought it divided people a little bit. I thought it alienated people from art.”
Johnston says, “Because it needed too much theoretical…”
“Yeah,” says Jean-Michel. “It seemed very college oriented.”
It’s a revealing answer: it shows much of what he stands for as an artist.
Johnston soon asks about his favorite artists. Jean-Michel keeps it simple: “Mostly Rauschenberg and Warhol.”
Later, she asks what books he likes, mentioning that he was reading William Burroughs the last time he visited Los Angeles. Jean-Michel comes up with a take on Burroughs and Mark Twain that shows a unique mind.
“I was going to say Burroughs,” he says, “but I thought I’d sound too young. ’Cause everybody [says] Burroughs all the time. But he’s my favorite living author, definitely. I think it’s really close to what Mark Twain writes, as far as point of view. It’s pretty similar, I think.”
As far as I know, not many people are comparing Burroughs to Twain. But Jean-Michel’s mind sees something there and makes an interesting connection. It’s a thought worthy of debate.
For one exchange, Johnston and Jean-Michel discuss art critics, and he looks both annoyed and amused as he talks about them, along with some resignation and perhaps disappointment.
Johnston: “And after you started to get famous and people started talking about your work, they also started talking a lot about you. I’m thinking in particular of the piece by Kay Larson in the Village Voice, after your show at Larry Gagosian’s two years ago.”
Jean-Michel: “I’ve had this a lot. Most of my reviews have been more reviews on my…”
Johnston interjects: “Of your personality.”
Jean-Michel: “Of my personality. More so than my work, mostly.”
Johnston: “So how do you react to that sort of thing?”
Jean-Michel: “They’re just racists, most of those people… They went and said my father was an accountant for a fast-food chain. And they talk about my graffiti endlessly, which I don’t really consider myself a graffiti artist, you know? So they have this image of me: wild man running, you know, wild monkey man, whatever the fuck they think.”
Johnston: “It seems to me that of all the painters out there, you’re the one who constantly gets singled out as the enfant terrible.”
Jean-Michel: “But at the same time, I enjoy that they think I’m a bad boy. I think it’s great.”
Johnston: “Compare the kind of press you get to someone like Julian Schnabel or David Salle.”
Jean-Michel: “They attack Julian’s personality also sometimes. But they usually talk about the work and make art references and stuff because he coaches the interviewers.”
Johnston: “Right. Has anybody ever written anything about your work that you think is on the ball?”
Jean-Michel: “Probably Robert Farris Thompson I thought wrote the best thing — the guy that wrote Flash of the Spirit, which is probably the best book I ever read on African art. It’s one of the best.”
Johnston and Jean-Michel also chat about navigating the art world. In The Radiant Child, he never comes across as overly emotional or out of control. It’s quite the opposite. The main word I’d use for him is thoughtful… and pragmatic.
Johnston: “Do you still see yourself as naive, the way you described yourself as a kid?”
Jean-Michel, matter-of-factly: “Yeah. ’Cause I’m always embarrassed of the past — always. I always feel like if I knew more I wouldn’t have done that, or…”
Johnston interjects: “I mean naive, too, in relation to this incredibly high-pressure, competitive art world that you’re part of. Do you maintain a distance from it so that you don’t tend to get cynical about it? ’Cause you aren’t very cynical about it at all.”
Jean-Michel: “I don’t see what — being cynical about it doesn’t make sense. It’s like being cynical about yourself, ’cause it’s just you, really. It has nothing to do with them… I don’t think there really is an art world. There’s a few good artists and then everything else is extra… I really don’t think the art world exists. I really don’t think it exists. I mean, there’s people who like paintings and then there’s dealers and then there’s people who work at the museum, but I don’t think they’re collectively an ‘art world.’”
It’s an interesting passage, and I’m not exactly sure what to make of Jean-Michel’s take on the art world. I’m sure he’s coming up with something insightful, but he seems kind of naive about things like the war between the Old Guard and New Money-New Power and the points that Tom Wolfe made in The Painted Word.
Or maybe Jean-Michel does understand those things, but doesn’t dive into them with Johnston and Davis. I think, like I mentioned before, he’s still trying to figure out stuff, such as exactly why critics like Robert Hughes, Hilton Kramer, and Vivien Raynor are attacking him. After all, even though he’s brilliant, Jean-Michel is still young and inexperienced. Experience matters.
Johnston then goes into Warhol. Here’s first-hand source material, from Basquiat’s point of view, about the friendship-collaboration.
Johnston: “So what about Andy Warhol? You did a whole series of paintings with him?”
Jean-Michel: “Yeah, worked for a year on about, on a million paintings.”
Johnston: “How did you do the collaboration?”
Jean-Michel: “He would start most of the paintings. He would put something very concrete or recognizable, like a newspaper headline or a product logo, and then I would sort of deface it. And then I would try to get him to work some more on it, and then I would work more on it. I would try to get him to do at least two things, you know? (Laughs) He likes to do just one hit and then have me do all the work after that.”
Johnston: “Did you have rules, like you couldn’t actually paint over his stuff?”
Jean-Michel: “No, not at all, we used to paint over each other’s stuff all the time.”
Tamra Davis: “Was that the first time you did a collaboration?”
Jean-Michel: “Yeah, it was. Yeah.”
Johnston: “Well, you did the thing with Warhol and [Francesco] Clemente before that, didn’t you?”
Jean-Michel: “That’s right, yeah. Right. But that was a little different because the paintings moved around. In this, with me and Andy, we worked in the same place on the same paintings, instead of moving the paintings from studio to studio as we did with Clemente.”
Johnston: “Is Warhol the only artist you’d consider collaborating with?”
Jean-Michel: “I’ve been asked by other artists since then, so I really don’t know what to do now. I don’t know if I’ll make it a practice. I don’t know. I’ll do whatever I want to do.”
It’s the same thing he told Warhol in ’83: “Let’s just do what we want to do.”
Tamra Davis then asks: “What was it like working with Andy Warhol?”
Jean-Michel: “Well, listening to what he had to say was probably the most fun. Seeing how he dealt with things was probably the best part. ’Cause he’s really funny. Tells a lot of funny jokes.”
Johnston: “Does he talk about other artists or art a lot?”
Jean-Michel: “All the time, yeah.”
Then the interview starts to wind down, but he does say that he owns a couple of Warhol paintings, as well as a Picasso, a Haring, and a Kosuth.
So when looking at the collaboration, from Jean-Michel’s point of view, he made Warhol work — and he probably got Andy thinking that they should do whatever they want to do and not worry about how it would be received. It’s the most authentic way to create art. And by not thinking about trends and critics and whatnot, it’s the best way to create art that stands the test of the time.
It was an approach that paid off. While not well received by Vivien Raynor and The New York Times in 1985 (for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of the paintings), many of the artworks are now considered masterpieces. Also, if their work had failed the test of time, the paintings would not be constantly talked about and showcased in museums today. It all happened with Basquiat pushing Warhol to do something genuine, including getting Andy to paint by hand.
As for the friendship, Jean-Michel says Warhol was a hoot, and helped him to understand how to deal with things. I’m guessing that means handling art dealers and collectors and journalists and employees and so on. So Jean-Michel essentially confirms what was seen in the ’83 interview: Basquiat intellectually engaged by Warhol, and Basquiat continually laughing when Warhol cracked his jokes. These are all things that point to Jean-Michel finding a kindred spirit in Warhol — or, put another way, finding a close friend.
Lastly, we have, as first-hand source material, The Andy Warhol Diaries, which was published in 1989. Between 1976 and 1987, Warhol gave weekday updates to Pat Hackett, his friend and colleague, over the phone. Hackett then typed up the entries and saved them — Warhol wanted the diaries to be turned into a book after his death.
In The Andy Warhol Diaries, the docuseries, Larry Gagosian said that Jean-Michel was obsessed over Warhol. That may be true, but if you read the diaries, I don’t think it was a one way thing: Warhol seems obsessed over Jean-Michel.
You only have to look at the number of times Warhol mentions Jean-Michel in the diaries — between October 4, 1982, and February 17, 1987, Warhol brings up Jean-Michel in one hundred and fifty entries. 150. That’s a lot. (Oddly, in the index of The Andy Warhol Diaries, only eleven citations are filed under the name “Basquiat, Jean-Michel.”)
Warhol even mentions Jean-Michel in his last diary entry, on February 17, 1987, remembering when he went with Basquiat to see Miles Davis play at the Beacon Theater. So Warhol is thinking about Jean-Michel up to the very end. The diaries, in fact, suggest a significant relationship between the two, and that, perhaps, Warhol also found a kindred spirit — in Jean-Michel.
But the diaries show something disturbing: Warhol is far too casual with racial slurs aimed at Jean-Michel. He doesn’t come up with the epithets himself, but repeats what other people said. Warhol thinks it’s funny.
On Tuesday, August 9, 1983, Warhol tells the diary, “Paige [Powell] stayed overnight with Jean-Michel in his dirty smelly loft downtown. How I know it smells is because Chris was there and said (laughs) it was like a n — r’s loft.”
The diaries show the entire “N” word.
More than two years later, Warhol does it again on Monday, December 9, 1985: “Jean-Michel called me early in the morning to tell me about the fight with Philip Niarchos he had at Schnabel’s on Friday night. I guess he still remembers some funny comment Philip made once about how now they’re ‘letting n — rs into St. Moritz.’”
Again, the diaries show the entire “N” word.
There’s no excuse for what Warhol says.
So why did he use that word? Something I noticed is that Warhol may have used the diaries to lash out at Jean-Michel now and then.
On Sunday, November 24, 1985, Andy complains that “Jean-Michel hasn’t called me in a month, so I guess it’s really over. He went to Hawaii and Japan, but now he’s just in L.A. so you’d think he’d call.” Then when Jean-Michel finally calls in December, Warhol brings up the St. Moritz incident.
It’s a similar kind of thing for the August 9, 1983, entry. Warhol starts off saying that Paige Powell, a close friend and colleague of Warhol’s who dated Basquiat, stayed overnight with Jean-Michel. At the same time, the diaries show that Jean-Michel and Andy are going through a kind of courting period. So Warhol may have been jealous about Powell’s sleepover, and then lashes out with the loft insult.
Years later, in 1987, Warhol seems touchy about his relationship with Jean-Michel. On Sunday, January 11, 1987, Warhol tells the diary: “And Paige and I are fighting. She keeps making these digs about Jean-Michel, she said, ‘Are you starting up your gay affair again with Jean-Michel?’ and so I got my dig in and said, ‘Listen, I wouldn’t go to bed with him because he’s so dirty, and I can’t believe that anyone would. I mean, you’re the one who had the affair with a dirty, unwashed person.’”
Like I said, the friendship-collaboration between Warhol and Jean-Michel was VERY COMPLICATED.
I went through all of the diary entries in which Warhol mentions Jean-Michel. All of them — from 1982 to 1987. It’s a huge amount of material, and you can see certain patterns develop in the friendship-collaboration. But, remember, the diaries explain things from Warhol’s perspective. It’s not the definitive truth.
In 1982, Warhol mentions Jean-Michel in three entries, which includes the first lunch between them. Nothing major is happening with the friendship-collaboration, but, initially, Warhol has a distorted take on Jean-Michel, as if he’s a privileged, wannabe artist.
“He’s black,” Warhol tells the diary, “but some people say he’s Puerto Rican so I don’t know. And then Bruno discovered him and now he’s on Easy Street. He’s got a great loft on Christie Street. He was a middle-class Brooklyn kid — I mean, he went to college and things — and he was trying to be like that, painting in Greenwich Village.”
Who knows where Warhol was getting his information, but it wasn’t from Jean-Michel, who would have mentioned running away from his father and couch-surfing and only eating cheese doodles and creating art out of found objects because he didn’t have the cash for paints and canvases.
What’s interesting about the 1982 period of the friendship-collaboration is that critics, reporters, and whoever else sometimes credit Warhol for Jean-Michel’s silkscreen work in Los Angeles. But they should take a look at Warhol’s diaries. It’s HIGHLY UNLIKELY that Warhol made any contribution to the creation of Basquiat’s Tuxedo, for example. Why? The timeline doesn’t add up.
Jean-Michel and Warhol first met for the famous lunch on October 4, 1982, but Basquiat didn’t stay the entire time: he dashed back to his studio to paint the portrait of himself with Warhol. There’s NOTHING, in the diaries, to indicate that they had a long, complex discussion about the silkscreen process during that lunch. They were just feeling out each other, taking pictures, and keeping things casual.
For the next five weeks, Warhol doesn’t say a word about Jean-Michel. In fact, between October 27, 1982, and November 6, 1982, Warhol tours Hong Kong and Peking.
Then, on November 15, 1982, Warhol breezily mentions, in one sentence, that he had lunch again with Jean-Michel. After that sentence, he talks, at some length, about posing for the artist Julian Schnabel for two hours.
Soon after that November lunch, Jean-Michel flies out to L.A. to work with Fred Hoffman on Tuxedo. (Hoffman is not shy to tell people that Warhol had nothing to do with Basquiat’s silkscreen work. He also made that point in his book, The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat.)
Then, between November 16, 1982 and March 22, 1983, Warhol says NOTHING about Jean-Michel. If Jean-Michel had called and asked for pointers on silkscreening, Warhol probably would have mentioned it to the diary. Nothing’s there.
Jean-Michel completes Tuxedo in January 1983.
So everything points to Warhol making NO CONTRIBUTION whatsoever to Jean-Michel’s early silkscreen work.
Between March 23, 1983, and December 20, 1983, Warhol mentions Jean-Michel in thirty-one entries. On Wednesday, March 23, Warhol says “Jean-Michel Basquiat’s show sold out in Los Angeles.” Several weeks pass, and then Warhol brings up Jean-Michel again on Wednesday, May 18, 1983 — he talks about Jean-Michel’s drug use.
Over the course of 1983, the diary entries reveal a blooming friendship. It begins with Jean-Michel working out with Warhol and his private trainer — perhaps Warhol, who knows about the drug use, is concerned about Jean-Michel and tries to get him to live more healthily. At the same time, Jean-Michel starts to confide in Warhol, telling him that he never finished high school. “I’m surprised,” says Warhol on Sunday, August 21, 1983, “because I thought he went to college.” The next day, Warhol is taking pictures of Jean-Michel in a jockstrap for an art project.
By Friday, August 26, 1983, Warhol says Jean-Michel will be renting the property at 57 Great Jones Street. “Jean-Michel is trying to get on a regular daily painting schedule. If he doesn’t and he can’t pay his rent it’ll be hard to evict him. It’s always hard to get people out.” Warhol wasn’t being cold, just pragmatic.
A few days later, on Monday, September 5, 1983, Warhol says Jean-Michel called: “He wanted some philosophy, he came over and we talked, and he’s afraid he’s just going to be a flash in the pan. And I told him not to worry, that he wouldn’t be. But then I got scared because he’s rented our building on Great Jones and what if he is a flash in the pan and doesn’t have the money to pay his rent.”
But a few days before that entry, Warhol tells the diary that Jean-Michel wanted to buy the property, which shows Basquiat’s business acumen… and his confidence to even approach Andy with that offer. Warhol declined, saying he had long-term plans for the building.
Anyhow, Jean-Michel and Warhol are truly bonding. During the fall and winter of 1983, they get their nails done together; Jean-Michel gives Warhol an artsy gift (his cut-off hair glued to a football helmet, which Warhol loves); they take a trip to Milan, Italy, where Jean-Michel gives an interview to Domus and says he’s working on a “secret” collaboration, careful not to say it’s with Warhol; Warhol gives Jean-Michel a painting; Jean-Michel is regularly visiting Warhol’s office; and Jean-Michel and Warhol sit down for the interview for Andy Warhol’s T.V.
At one point, on Wednesday, October 5, 1983, Warhol tells the diary that Jean-Michel is “so nutty but cute and adorable.” But a day later, when Warhol and Jean-Michel are still in Milan, Andy tells the diary: “Jean-Michel came by and said he was depressed and was going to kill himself and I laughed and said it was because he hadn’t slept for four days, and then after a while of that he went back to his room.”
So Jean-Michel is opening up to Warhol in a deep, vulnerable way. That diary entry also gives a glimpse into Jean-Michel’s state of mind in late 1983, a period when his career and fame are skyrocketing.
Then, in 1984, the friendship and collaboration take off — between January 7, 1984, and December 19, 1984, Warhol mentions Jean-Michel in sixty-one diary entries. They’re constantly talking on the phone (Jean-Michel even calls from Hawaii and L.A.), and Jean-Michel is routinely visiting the office to hang out and paint. “Jean-Michel came by,” says Warhol on Thursday, April 12, 1984. “He’d been out all night. Got him to work on one of our joint paintings.” So the collaboration is happening.
A few days later, on Monday, April 16, 1984, Warhol says, “Jean-Michel was at the office, he brought his lunch and he was on the floor painting and not talking much. I think he stays up all night and so that was his bedtime.” The next day, Warhol says: “Got to the office and called Jean-Michel and he came up and painted over a painting that I did, and I don’t know if it got better or not.”
So while Jean-Michel told Becky Johnston and Tamra Davis, in 1986, that he got Warhol to do work on their paintings, Warhol is telling the diary that he’s making the collaboration happen. Perspectives.
Fred Hoffman, in The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, has his own take on Jean-Michel’s comments to Johnston and Davis — an interview that took place several months after Vivien Raynor’s nasty review of the Warhol-Basquiat show.
“When asked about his collaborative work with Andy Warhol,” writes Hoffman about the 1986 interview, “Jean-Michel Basquiat says, ‘Andy usually did one hit and was done.’ While he has a smile on his face as he makes this comment, his words are indicative of the frustration he felt with the project. With hindsight, I would suggest his frustration has more to do with how these works were received, and much less to do with the artwork. Yes, there are examples such as Untitled (“Clearboy”) where Andy laid down two, possibly three images and then abandoned the work, leaving Basquiat to complete it. For the most part, however, Basquiat’s comment on Warhol’s limited participation is simply inaccurate. In many of the most accomplished works, we find multiple layers of imagery by both artists.”
In 1984, though, Warhol and Jean-Michel are trying to keep the collaboration a secret from their art dealer, Bruno Bischofberger. On Monday, May 7, 1984, Warhol tells the diary, “So went to the office and the office was busy. Bruno was there and Jean-Michel was hiding our work from Bruno — the ones that just Jean-Michel and I are doing.”
As the collaboration unfolds, Warhol only gives high praise for Jean-Michel’s work. First, on Monday, September 17, 1984, he acknowledges that “Jean-Michel got me into painting differently, so that’s a good thing.” Then on Tuesday, October 2, 1984, Warhol tells the diary: “Jean-Michel came over to the office to paint but he fell asleep on the floor. He looked like a bum lying there. But I woke him up and he did two masterpieces that were great.” On Wednesday, October 31, 1984, Warhol says that Jean-Michel is “going to be the Big Black Painter.” And on Sunday, November 4, 1984, Warhol again tells the diary that Jean-Michel has painted “some masterpieces.” By Thursday, January 10, 1985, Warhol says, “I think Jean-Michel will be the most famous black artist after this New York Times thing comes out.”
So Andy is mightily impressed by Jean-Michel — and Basquiat is clearly holding his own with Warhol.
At the same time, they’re often socializing with each other: grabbing a bite at The Odeon; heading over to the nightclub Area; attending birthday parties, including one for Jean-Michel’s mother; taking a trip to Washington D.C.; always talking on the phone, even when Jean-Michel is visiting Sweden and Spain; and spending Thanksgiving with each other — they go see Boy George at Madison Square Garden and then head over to Halston’s, the famous fashion designer.
Throughout this period, Warhol is also saying that Jean-Michel is “paranoid” and taking drugs and “hard to talk to.” Still, 1984 is probably the high point of the friendship-collaboration.
But, in 1985, things start to change, and Warhol sees it coming. On Saturday, March 9, 1985, Andy tells the diary: “And Jean-Michel was complaining about the show that we’re having with Bruno… oh, I don’t know, I think that whole period is over, with him coming up to paint. He hasn’t come that much to the new building, just a few times, and — well, he’s feeling on top now that his show is running downtown, but I don’t know if he’s working.” They still go out and socialize, and now and then Jean-Michel goes over to Warhol’s office to paint, and Andy still loves his work: on May 9, 1985, Warhol raves, “He’s working again and his work is wonderful, it’s so exciting, and I think he will last…” and, on July 10, 1985, he says, “Jean-Michel came by and did a masterpiece upstairs.” But it’s not the same — Warhol only mentions Jean-Michel in thirty-eight entries for 1985.
Finally, they have the joint show at Tony Shafrazi’s gallery on September 14, 1985, which is followed by Raynor’s review in The New York Times. “I just read one line,” Warhol tells the diary on Thursday, September 19, 1985, “that Jean-Michel was my ‘mascot.’ Oh God.” The next day, he says Jean-Michel wasn’t mad at him, but he clearly takes a break from Warhol. On Monday, October 14, 1985, Warhol says, “And oh, I really missed Jean-Michel so much yesterday. I called him up and either he was being distant or he was high. I told him I missed him a lot.”
As far as I can see in the diaries, Warhol and Jean-Michel never paint together again. They still hang out now and then, and they call each other here and there, but the art is over — in 1986, Warhol only mentions Jean-Michel in fourteen diary entries.
When you read the diaries from late 1985 to his death in February 1987, you actually feel sorry for Warhol — he’s clearly hurting over Jean-Michel. Even when Warhol goes to see the movie The Color Purple, he’s thinking of Basquiat. On Monday, December 23, 1985, he tells the diary: “And Whoopi Goldberg reminded me so much of Jean-Michel. The hands over her mouth when she laughed, just everything.” We’ve all been there. It’s rough.
What’s so interesting is that Jean-Michel’s inconsolable grief over Warhol’s death and Andy’s sadness over his fractured relationship with Jean-Michel show, without a doubt, that the friendship was REAL. In fact, the friendship may have been MORE IMPORTANT to them than the collaboration — because they didn’t get all emotional over the death of the art. And that only underlines the REALNESS between them.
Tuesday, January 6, 1987, may be the last time they talked. Warhol tells the diary: “Jean-Michel called at 3:00 in the morning and I talked to him and it just ruined my sleep.” A few weeks later, only days before his death on February 22, 1987, Warhol is talking to the diary about meeting Miles Davis. Yes, the Miles Davis. But what does Andy do in the middle of the story? He stops to tell the diary that he and Jean-Michel went to a Miles Davis concert together.
Postscript: There’s a definite possibility that Jean-Michel used The Subterraneans to cope with his grief over Warhol’s death. In the book, Kerouac was working through the emotions (grief) of possibly losing the love of his life, fearing he may never find that kind of person again. That’s the same type of thing Jean-Michel may have felt with Andy. The famous photograph of Jean-Michel guardedly clutching a tattered copy of The Subterraneans was taken in 1988, after Warhol had died — so the timeline adds up.
That picture was used for the invitation to Basquiat’s last gallery show, which opened on Friday, April 29, 1988, in New York City. It’s a sign that, at the very least, The Subterraneans influenced the paintings in that exhibit, such as using Kerouac’s relentless self-examination from the book. Just look at Riding with Death and Eroica I and Eroica II.
Jean-Michel also wrote “attractive light skin black female” in Eroica II, and Kerouac described Mardou Fox as having “pale brown skin.” In his own clever way, Basquiat could have been acknowledging the influence of The Subterraneans.
Dark Race Horse/Jesse Owens
After Gallery Two, on Jean-Michel’s birthday, I walked out to the courtyard for a breather. A staff member waved at me, and we chatted for a bit, then I entered Gallery Three. Its theme was “Royalty,” and the royalty showcased in this space, through Jean-Michel’s paintings, were Black folks: Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, Nat King Cole and Tommy Potter, Sugar Ray Robinson and Jesse Owens, and others. It was Jean-Michel’s way of saying, through his art, that Black folks matter, that Black folks’ contributions to America matter, that Jean-Michel won’t allow Black folks and their contributions to be erased. After all, Black history is American history — the two aren’t separate.
Jean-Michel’s documentation of Black American history and culture, which have been neglected and erased by mainstream society for centuries, is one of the most important things he ever did with his art. Because when people’s history and culture are erased, you erase those people, as if they never existed. Jean-Michel was working to stop that — and to put things into the official record. Tuxedo, the silkscreen painting, is just one example of that.
Jean-Michel was fully aware that he was carrying out a kind of public service. “Black people are never portrayed realistically in… not even portrayed in modern art enough,” Jean-Michel said in the interview with Geoff Dunlop and Sandy Nairne, “and I’m glad that I do that.” Asked if he was making historical documents, Jean-Michel said, “Yes.”
In 1986, he mentioned something similar. Becky Johnston asked what he would do if he wasn’t painting. Jean-Michel said he’d probably direct movies, but not any kind of movie. “Ones in which Black people are portrayed as being people of the human race,” he said. “And not aliens and not all negative and not all thieves and drug dealers and the whole bit. Just real stories.”
Hughes, Kramer, Raynor, and other critics and art-world insiders (such as the folks at the Museum of Modern Art in New York) either didn’t care about Jean-Michel’s vital work as a kind of historian-documentarian of Black American history and culture or didn’t understand that work because they refused to engage Jean-Michel’s art. Either way, it’s not good.
Only in his twenties, Jean-Michel’s decision to document Black American history and culture was courageous for all kinds of reasons, including the very real possibility that collectors, dealers, critics, and museum directors may not get it or may be turned off by it. So we’re talking about an artist who was not only substantive, but also high-minded and brave. His art, in the end, had purpose.
(Before I go any further, I must mention, somewhere in here, Jean-Michel’s portraits of non-celebrities. They are outstanding — he had a remarkable way of capturing a person’s soul, which is no easy thing to do. Jean-Michel told Becky Johnston and Tamra Davis that art dealers “really hated” the portraits, but artists liked them. The artists were right. In 2022, I tracked down a little-known portrait at the Dallas Museum of Art called “Sam F,” a captivating work of a wheelchair-bound businessman named Sam Feldman that Jean-Michel had befriended, in Dallas, in 1985. (Sam’s wife, Helga, told a great story about the session in a 2020 interview. His canvas was a dirty door, and he used Helga’s old paints.) Jean-Michel painted many others, including portraits of Fred Hoffman, Andy Warhol’s one-time love interest Jon Gould, and a photographer-stylist named Michael Patterson. The Patterson portrait, created in 1984 and titled “MP,” went up for auction in 2020. It’s stunning. “Once he captured the eyes,” Patterson said in a video for Christie’s, “that’s when I kind of freaked out. He captured my soul in my eyes.” Like I mentioned before, always check out the eyes… Maybe I missed it, but I’m still waiting for a proper exhibition that focuses only on Jean-Michel’s non-celebrity portraits. It would be fascinating.)
Now we come to my favorite painting in Gallery Three, and it involves a person of great historical importance: Jesse Owens, an American hero if there ever was one. The painting is titled, cheekily, Dark Race Horse/Jesse Owens.
Owens, a.k.a. the “Buckeye Bullet,” was a track superstar at The Ohio State University in the 1930s, winning EIGHT individual NCAA championships. But he still faced the ungodly indignities of eating at Blacks-only restaurants and staying at Blacks-only hotels. Then, in 1936, Owens went to Berlin to compete in the Summer Olympics. That’s when Hitler was in charge, and he even attended the competitions. Hitler put on a big show, in fact.
So here was this crazed, power-hungry, murderous fascist who wanted to take over the world, saying that only a certain kind of white man is superior and everyone else must perish, especially the Jews. And then there was Jesse Owens, a Black, All-American athlete from Oakville, Alabama, who wouldn’t back down — and won FOUR gold medals. He beat everyone while Hitler or some other high-ranking Nazi was watching! In less than 11 seconds, with Owens winning the 100-meter dash, Hitler’s superior white man B.S. went swiftly down the drain. Through his awesome talent, and an all-out dedication to his sport, Owens stuck it to Hitler — for all of us.
Knowing all that, it’s no surprise that Jean-Michel paid his respects to Owens, painting a kind of portrait of the hero’s lower leg and foot. And it’s no surprise that Jean-Michel connected with Owens — Jean-Michel was also a superstar who, no matter how great his talent, still had to navigate the racists. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or not (most likely not when it comes to Jean-Michel), but Owens was twenty-two years old, almost twenty-three, when he won in Berlin. Jean-Michel was the same age when he painted Dark Race Horse/Jesse Owens.
In Gallery Three, the Owens painting stood out from all the other artworks — it was the only one with a background that’s completely black. It looked like Jean-Michel had done a number of revisions, as if there was a painting underneath the finished painting. At one point, Jean-Michel seemed to have painted Owens’s entire leg, then decided to black out the top part. He also wrote, at the bottom of the painting, JESSE OWENS with a copyright symbol — and then blacked that out. And he wrote a bunch of letters, perhaps a word, that he blacked out: a “P” or “R” and an “A” and a “T” and a “U” and an “R” and an “E” or “B.” It kind of formed the word “rapture” or “rupture.” (I could easily be missing other letters. It was hard to make out.)
From the get-go, Jean-Michel wanted you to know exactly whose leg and foot you’re looking at. In the upper right-hand corner, he wrote, with his inimitable handwriting, “JESSE OWENS” in white. Below the foot, Jean-Michel twice wrote “JESSE OWENS” in white. So it’s clear: you’re looking at Jesse Owens’s leg.
Jean-Michel also wanted you to know why he painted about Owens — and why, perhaps, Owens should not only be celebrated, but also never forgotten. Only inches below the foot, Jean-Michel wrote, and highlighted, “1936” in white. Underneath that are the five, interlocking circles of the Olympics symbol — it represents the union, or unity, of the five continents participating in the games. Not sure if Jean-Michel was purposely hinting at unity, but I wouldn’t put it past him — he knew about the meanings of symbols. Then Jean-Michel wrote “1936 OLYMPICS” in white with Berlin underneath that and “1936 — Berlin” in white.
So the stage has been set. We’re looking at THE Jesse Owens: the Buckeye Bullet, the man who made Hitler look like a fool in front of the WORLD. The way Jean-Michel composed everything, you’re forced to stop and think and take it all in. You’re forced to remember what happened in 1936 in Berlin, and you’re forced to remember that Jesse Owens showed Hitler what’s what. In fact, Owens also showed the bigots back in America what’s what — he was the first American to win four gold medals in a single Olympics.
But the portrait isn’t static. Like No Summer Hot Water Ossning, Jean-Michel added movement to it by painting four arrows, pointed in the same direction, around Jesse’s ankle. There’s also an eruption of some kind coming out of Jesse’s achilles tendon — it’s around here that those letters, perhaps spelling “rapture” or “rupture,” are blacked out.
Dark Race Horse/Jesse Owens was completed in 1983 — forty-seven years after the 1936 Summer Games. By 1983, Jean-Michel was already dealing with, in a high-profile way, the racism inside the overwhelmingly white small town-art world. Hilton Kramer, for example, threw that sucker punch at Jean-Michel — “his contribution to art is so minuscule as to be practically nil” — in 1982. So by celebrating Owens, Jean-Michel was sticking it to the racists, too.
But Basquiat wasn’t just a Black artist. He was, in fact, an AMERICAN artist. It’s similar to Owens. In Berlin, he wasn’t merely a Black athlete — he was the first American athlete to win four gold medals in a single Olympics. And as Americans, through their exceptional commitment, talents, and skills, Jean-Michel and Owens contributed mightily to the overall American experiment.
The thing about Jean-Michel is that he was incredibly sophisticated when tackling issues such as racism. He used the new syntax that Jeffrey Deitch talked about and his deep knowledge of art history that Annina Nosei talked about and the enigmatic hints that Robert Farris Thompson talked about, allowing him to create impactful ART, not just a political rant. It also allowed Jean-Michel to create art that stands the test of time, which gives his subject matter a timelessness.
It’s very similar to how a young Bob Dylan, who also had a thing for Kerouac and moved to Manhattan to kick-start a creative life, wrote his songs (“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” etc.) in the early ’60s, which still stand up today.
That’s all very sophisticated — and wise.
The Secret of the Nu-Nile
From there, I headed into Gallery Four — the great finale. The artworks are BIG and BOLD and RIGHTEOUS. The whole thing is funny, too. A fantastic example of how Jean-Michel could be so beautifully uncompromising. Gallery Four always made me chuckle with a mix of admiration and delight.
For the great finale, the Basquiat sisters re-created the Palladium, a famed nightclub on 14th Street in New York City. In 1985, the owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, got Julian Schnabel, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, Jean-Michel, and other artists to create artworks for their new club. But, at first, Jean-Michel wasn’t sure if he wanted to do it.
“Jean was kind of hemming and hawing,” Scharf said at the King Pleasure panel, “and I said, ‘Come on, you got to do it.’ And I think I was the one that convinced him to do it. And then bang! I swear, he did [a painting] the next day.”
Once committed, Jean-Michel created not just one, but two mural-size artworks for the VIP room at the Palladium, which opened on May 14, 1985.
Here’s the funny part. Jean-Michel could have painted people dancing or a couple kissing or some other thing like that. It would’ve been easy. Instead, he came up with two massive artworks that tried to make people think — in a drug-and-alcohol-fueled, bass-pounding, nerve-shattering, ear-splitting disco. It’s so clever and uncompromising and all-around awesome that I laugh every time I think about it. People would be drunk or stoned or revved up for one reason or another, but Jean-Michel wanted to stop them in their tracks — and make them think. I’m not a Basquiat expert like Fred Hoffman or Jeffrey Deitch, and I haven’t seen all of Jean-Michel’s work, but when you factor in that these paintings were showcased in a nightclub, there may be few other artworks in Jean-Michel’s oeuvre that show how uncompromising and substantive and idealistic he could be.
On one wall, in Gallery Four, there was Untitled (Palladium). It’s sixteen feet by nineteen feet and features the huge, gold-green head of some kind of creature — I always thought it was a cougar. The King Pleasure catalog said the creature was based on a small wood sculpture Jean-Michel owned. In the painting, just behind the creature’s eyes, Jean-Michel added his trademark crown with “EEP” repeated three times underneath it. “EEP” comes across as a kind of code.
Around the creature, Jean-Michel appeared to paste color photocopies of his drawings: a drawing of a police car; an anatomical drawing of a hand; a drawing of a skull with yellowish teeth; a drawing of the inside of a stomach; a drawing of a bicycle; a drawing of two lists that include “Plymouth” and “Chrysler” and “Petrol” and “Asbestos” (a favorite word of Jean-Michel’s that he also used in the poem/voiceover outtake that I heard at the start of the exhibit); and, among other things, a drawing of a barrel of “Esso” oil with the words “Gasoline Co.” The images and words repeat themselves all over the painting. Mixed in with everything, in the right-hand corner of the artwork, there’s a thought-provoking phrase written on one of the drawings: “How the society operates.” Hmmmmm.
But you have to really look at the painting to see all these things. You have to obey Jean-Michel — and STOP and THINK in the middle of a soul-pounding, sweat-drenched nightclub on the edge of the East Village at one o’clock in the morning. Beautiful!
On the opposite wall, in Gallery Four, there was Nu-Nile, a truly terrific painting. It’s around nine feet by forty-one feet, and Jean-Michel had a thing for world globes. There are at least three globes in the painting, one of which highlights the continent of Africa. NOT the United States or Europe or Asia or anywhere else. He gave Africa top billing, so to speak. That’s meaningful.
With his use of black and red paint, Jean-Michel essentially broke down Nu-Nile into four panels. From left to right, the first panel shows a globe with red paint splattered over a bunch of words that were written in white — Jean-Michel splattered the paint in such a way that it looks like blood, not paint, that’s obscuring the words.
The second panel has another globe — painted gray — and a fried egg and two black heads and one black skull, with “EEP” painted in white on top of it.
The third panel has two mysterious figures painted in black with intense, white eyes — they always looked like outer-space aliens to me, but they could be referencing something from African cultures.
In the final panel, Jean-Michel painted a silver crown with the word “NOTARY” underneath it; the globe with Africa taking top billing; an “EEP” above the globe; and another alien (or perhaps a griot figure) underneath the globe. He also painted an oil rig and a barrel with “OIL” written on it; the word “PETROL” just above the oil barrel (the word “petrol” also showed up in Untitled (Palladium)); and a kind of storage tank that’s yellow with the word “NU-NILE” on it, which reminded me of the oil storage tanks you’d see driving along the New Jersey Turnpike. Or Jean-Michel was referencing Murray’s Nu Nile Hair Slick, which comes in a round, yellow tin… which is fun and funny and clever, if so… or maybe he was referencing both an oil storage tank and Murray’s hair slick.
A lot of stuff going on, and a lot of stuff to inspect and digest and figure out at one o’clock in the morning. But it would have been worth your time.
Because if you decided to obey Jean-Michel and study Nu-Nile, and if you knew a few things about world affairs in the spring of 1985, and if you noticed the globe that gave Africa top billing, you could figure out that one of the prominent themes in the painting is oil production in Africa. And from there, you could reasonably guess that Jean-Michel was making a statement about how oil production in Africa — run by corrupt politicians and greedy oil companies — was polluting the environment and, despite all the riches, not lifting people out of poverty. Bang! You found something cool and powerful that you never expected to find in any nightclub in New York City.
It would have been especially cool and powerful if you had picked up the Sunday New York Times on May 5, 1985 — only nine days before opening night at the Palladium. You would have seen, on the front-page below the fold, this headline: “Expelled Foreigners Pouring Out of Nigeria.” And you would have read, in the first paragraph, that “thousands of illegal aliens, carrying mattresses, clothing and cooking utensils, poured back across the borders to their homelands today, ordered out by Nigeria’s military rulers.”
The article further reported, “The foreigners have been attracted to Nigeria in part by an oil boom in the 1970s, but now the West African nation has deep economic problems and an increasing crime rate, which it attributes in large measure to the immigrants.”
(The powerful once again pinning stuff on immigrants… See how certain power structures work pretty much the same everywhere? The powerful love the old divide-and-conquer technique.)
And the article explained, “The illegal immigrants were among the millions of West Africans, mostly from Ghana, who flooded into Nigeria in hopes of benefitting from the country’s oil-based economy. But world demand for oil has waned and the price has dropped, sending Nigeria into a steep economic decline and swelling its foreign debt.”
The article also told you, “Ghanaian officials said about 300,000 of the 700,000 foreigners were migrant workers from Ghana. Officials said 100,000 were from Niger and most of the rest from Chad and Cameroon.
“In addition to the attraction of Nigeria’s oil boom, many of the non-Ghanaians came to Nigeria to escape drought and the threat of famine in their home countries.”
And now you’re seeing a mural, behind the bar in the VIP room at the Palladium, that seems to be referencing a lot of that stuff. All kinds of questions pop into your head: Did the artist read the same article I read? Did he use it as inspiration to create the painting? When did the artist actually paint the mural? What’s going on here? Who’s the artist? I need to meet him!
For me, the Times article from May 5, 1985, is incredibly intriguing. I’d love to know if Jean-Michel read that, and it’s almost certain he did. Because if you were a smart, knowledge-hungry young dude moving around in New York’s artistic-intellectual circles in the 1980s, the Sunday New York Times was absolute, 100 percent, mandatory reading — week in and week out.
So if he read that, he would have noticed, undoubtedly, that the reporter repeatedly used the word “aliens” in the top half of the article — in fact, “aliens” is the fourth word in the very first sentence. It’s a weird word to use when you’re writing about humans who are obviously suffering. There’s something unsympathetic using that word. And it’s something that Jean-Michel, a connoisseur of words with an eye for detail, would have picked up, possibly thinking the reporter was a cold-hearted jackass, which then moved him to make a statement with the three alien-like figures around the barrel of oil and the oil rig and the Africa-centric globe. It all kind of fits.
Especially since Andy Warhol said in his diaries, on Tuesday, May 7, 1985, that Jean-Michel had “decided not to do anything for Steve Rubell’s new club.” So with Kenny Scharf urging him to do something, Jean-Michel obviously changed his mind after May 7, and then quickly painted Nu-Nile before the Palladium’s opening on May 14. With that timeline, the Sunday New York Times article from May 5 could have been source material for the artwork. In fact, on Sunday, May 12, 1985, Warhol said in his diaries: “Jean-Michel called, he’s working on his painting for the Palladium. But it’s collapsible and he can take it away any time he wants.”
Another thing at play is that Africa was having a HUGE public moment in the early part of 1985. In December 1984, the plight of poor Africans had turned into a heavy-duty cause within pop culture with the release of “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” — a hit song in the UK and US that raised millions in cash for famine relief in Ethiopia. A few months later, that was followed by “We Are the World” — a pop hit that raked in even more millions for African famine relief. Released in March 1985, “We Are the World” was the number-one song in America for weeks. So Jean-Michel, who was twenty-four at the time, could have been inspired by all that, deciding to do his own consciousness-raising for Africa by painting Nu-Nile.
There’s something else that could be going on with the paintings.
Over the course of nine visits to King Pleasure, I probably ended up inspecting those murals in the Palladium room for a total of four or five hours. After the sixth or seventh trip to the exhibit, I finally came up with those ideas about Nu-Nile, but Untitled (Palladium) kept baffling me — since both murals had the word “petrol,” it seemed that there should be a connection.
Then, one night before my tenth visit, I was leafing through The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader. On page 353, there was a black-and-white picture of the VIP room in the Palladium, with Untitled (Palladium) hung on one wall and Nu-Nile directly across the room on the opposite wall. In other words, the paintings were facing each other — and it was set up the same way at King Pleasure. That picture loosened up something in my mind. Because each painting features that code word: EEP. It got me thinking that maybe Jean-Michel had the two paintings communicating with each other, in code, with the EEPs. Delightful, I thought, if that’s what Jean-Michel was trying to pull off.
So with that notion in my head, on Jean-Michel’s birthday at King Pleasure, I stood in the Palladium room, looking back and forth at the paintings. I wanted to see if my idea was totally nuts. But it wasn’t. Because you can’t rule anything out when it comes to Jean-Michel. Like I keep saying, he was clever.
As I kept staring at Nu-Nile, I became convinced, more than ever, that Jean-Michel was one of the most important American artists of the second half of the twentieth century. He gave Pollock, Rothko, Lichtenstein, Ruscha, Twombly, Warhol, and all the others a run for their money. Not only because of the artistic merit of his work, but also because of his subject matter and what he was trying to accomplish. Jean-Michel was clearly using his powerful art to confront and reshape the American elite’s narrative of what was historically important, who should get credit, and who should be included. He also held the powerful to account, especially powerful racists. Jean-Michel did it time and again for years — from Nu-Nile to Dark Race Horse/Jesse Owens to Tuxedo to Untitled (Pamphlet). That work is incredibly important, as well as brave and dangerous — the American elite don’t want their history rewritten, and they don’t want their sins to be exposed.
I looked at Nu-Nile a few minutes longer, then my visit with Jean-Michel on his birthday was over. As I drove home on the surface streets, I was feeling down. The end was near.
Get With It!
On New Year’s Day, I arrived at King Pleasure in the late afternoon — around four o’clock or so. It was closing day. The end. No more King Pleasure. I wasn’t happy about it.
As I walked through the exhibit, I decided to not take notes. I just wanted to look around and appreciate and commune one more time with the spirit of Jean-Michel. When I stepped into Gallery Four, the re-creation of the Palladium, I didn’t want to leave — I didn’t want the end to end.
So I was hanging around, looking at Nu-Nile, and, at around six-thirty, I heard a woman say, “The Basquiat exhibit is officially closed. It is complete. Wow!” People started clapping, and I looked over to my left — the woman was Lisane Basquiat, one of the sisters.
A minute or two after that, I walked out. The street was dark and quiet and deserted. For some reason, during my visit, Robert Farris Thompson’s line kept repeating over and over in my mind: “His paintings were deliberate enigmas. And they, in effect, said, ‘Get with it! See the complexity of our culture. I’ll give you a few hints.’”
Parting Words
In 1985, Geoff Dunlop and Sandy Nairne asked Jean-Michel if media attention caused him problems.
Jean-Michel: “Well, James Rosenquist told me that art isn’t show business, and I think that’s something that I have to remember.”
“Why?”
Jean-Michel: “I think it’s a bad frame of mind for the artist in a way.”
“Do you know why?”
Jean-Michel: “Because it makes you too regular, and you don’t want to be.”
“A Visit with Jean-Michel Basquiat on His Birthday” was originally published at Letters From Over Here on Medium.