In Progress: The Never-Ending Boom - Jean-Michel Basquiat
Basquiat's liberating time in Los Angeles
This article about the world-renowned artist Jean-Michel Basquiat is an excerpt from a work in progress by Patrick Range McDonald. Titled “The Never-Ending Boom: Jean-Michel Basquiat,” the ground-breaking book confronts the critics that bullied Basquiat during his lifetime and makes the case that the artist is more substantive, more important, and more brilliant than even his admirers fully understand. “The Never-Ending Boom” is also an inspiring celebration of the human spirit. In the book, McDonald takes readers on a one-of-a-kind journey by giving them a personal tour of the acclaimed “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure” exhibit. For this excerpt, McDonald explores Basquiat’s liberating time in Los Angeles during the 1980s.
On a wall in Gallery One at King Pleasure, just around the corner from the re-created family room of his teen-age home in Brooklyn, 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 journalists and art historians. They may think it’s unimportant, but they would be wrong.
Jean-Michel started flying out to L.A. from New York in the spring of 1982 for a solo show at the Larry Gagosian Gallery in West Hollywood, a small city in between Beverly Hills and Los Angeles. Gagosian, who would become a world-famous art dealer, invited Jean-Michel to L.A. after seeing his 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 I attended in August 2023, “I saw five or six paintings, 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.”
Jean-Michel arrived in L.A. at a time when yet another Black man had died from a controversial chokehold used by Los Angeles police officers, stirring outrage throughout the city; homeless encampments were becoming more common in L.A., with city politicians taking little action; the movie Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip had just been released; comic superstar John Belushi had recently died of a drug overdose at the Chateau Marmont hotel in L.A.; and the Chicano art movement, with its spectacular, outdoor murals, was gaining wider notice in Los Angeles.
A lot was happening in the city, and Jean-Michel was about to make his own splash with his show on April 8, 1982.
Cranking up publicity for the exhibit, Larry Gagosian sent out a press release that played up Jean-Michel’s loose connection to graffiti artists – even though Basquiat would often say that he didn’t consider himself a graffiti artist, especially since some critics tried to use the graffiti tag as a way to delegitimize his work. So one has to wonder if Jean-Michel had read the press release before it went out or if Gagosian had convinced Jean-Michel to play up the graffiti angle for L.A.’s art collectors. To wit:
Jean-Michel Basquiat will exhibit graffiti style paintings which have been compared to young Jean Dubuffet’s work in their “brut” quality.
Basquiat combines rough canvas and a direct technique which aggressively overwhelms and dominates the viewer. He uses acrylic, spray paint and oil stick to create a layered effect similar to graffiti build-up on city walls and buildings.
Included in the Basquiat exhibit will be large mixed media paintings on wood and other large paintings on canvas.
Reception for the artist April 8, 1982 7PM—9:00
Gagosian (or Jean-Michel) was savvy enough to add the comparison to renowned French artist and sculptor Jean Dubuffet, the inventor of Art Brut or “raw art,” a kind of movement of self-taught artists, such as children, psychiatric patients, prisoners in jails, who operated outside mainstream culture and weren’t heavily influenced by art history.
The comparison, in certain ways, fit: Jean-Michel was a self-described autodidact who never formally studied at an art school. But he did have a solid knowledge of art history, he had influences from art history, and he operated within the mainstream art world (for good and for ill), although certain power players in New York’s art-world establishment refused to accept him.
Since Gagosian (or Jean-Michel) brought up Dubuffet, I watched The Artist’s Studio: Jean Dubuffet, an instructive, even inspiring documentary by Michael Blackwood. Filmed in 1973, Dubuffet was seventy-two years old at the time, and in excellent form. As he sat in his studio in Paris, smoking a cigarette, Dubuffet made it clear that Art Brut isn’t just about a style — it’s a philosophy, which he wrote about extensively and was collected for a 1988 book titled Asphyxiating Culture.
During the interview for the film, Dubuffet was asked what was the relationship between culture and art.
“I think art is creation, and art is creation in process,” he said. “And culture is creation done, already done, creation of the past. And I’m sure that studying the things already done is a danger for artists because what is wanted from an artist is he invents new things and not to conform what has already been done by others in the past. He must do something new, something very different from the past that has been done.”
Dubuffet also said at one point: “Of course, I want to have a similar position as the insane have. That is to say, to ignore the culture and to ignore the normal – to make something non-normal. I think that is what is wanted from an artist. To make something non-normal – exceptional! And to open a new way of looking at things and new openings for the mind. Different from the ordinary ones.”
I wondered what Jean-Michel would have thought about all that in 1982, and I wondered what he would have thought today if he had kept living.
In 2006, for a catalog for a Dubuffet-Basquiat exhibit at PaceWildenstein Gallery in New York City, contemporary art curator Lawrence Rinder summed up the Dubuffet-Basquiat connection this way: “Dubuffet was not a hollow Modernist, overturning convention for its own sake; nor was Basquiat a ‘primitive’ savant, magically creating works that have no meaning beyond their radiant energy. Rather, both Dubuffet and Basquiat were engaged in a methodical exploration of states of perception, knowing, and being. They used the means that best suited their purpose, arriving at remarkably similar artistic forms.”
When the Gagosian show opened in April 1982, it was an instant success, featuring eye-catching artworks – Untitled (L.A. Painting), one of my favorites by Basquiat, was displayed there – and completely selling out.
Los Angeles Times art critic William Wilson wrote about the exhibit: “This 22-year-old kid from Brooklyn makes his L.A. debut with a dozen of the most vigorous Neo-Expressionist paintings I have seen to date… They are, in fact, so lacking in the wan sense of futility and jejune intellectual pretension often associated with the movement one could attend closely to an argument that they are not New Wave pictures at all. So much, perhaps, the better.”
Jean-Michel wasn’t twenty-two in April 1982, but the review was an unequivocal rave.
Then, in November 1982, Jean-Michel returned to L.A. to do work for another exhibit with Gagosian in March 1983. Tamra Davis, a young film student at the time who would later make a documentary about Basquiat, got 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 2023. “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 message that the viewer must decode. The Paris Review, the prestigious literary magazine, was so impressed that it published a “portfolio” of Tuxedo in the Spring 1983 issue – a perfect place for such a literary artwork.
“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 work, he still seemed to be making social commentary on America and, possibly, Western civilization.
What’s intriguing is that at the top of the work, 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 from American, European, and world history. Such as Malcolm X, the boxer Joe Lewis, Haitian baseball factories, Henry Ford, President Andrew Jackson, the cotton gin, 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 constant whitewashing of history: “Hey! You can’t 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 of U.S. currency. For the final touch, Jean-Michel placed a crown on top of that, as if he’s saying that money is king – and the aggressive drive for it, by the powers that be, has impacted people and events throughout history.
That’s how I see it. Others may have a different take.
But whenever I look at Tuxedo and other paintings by Jean-Michel, I always think of a story that was brought up in The Radiant Child, the 2010 documentary by Tamra Davis. Bruno Bischofberger, the art dealer, talked about a time when he made a small criticism of Jean-Michel’s work. Basquiat responded: “These look very sloppy these paintings, but every line and everything I do, I know exactly what I do. And it has to be like that. And don’t you think this is done by chance.” So with a work like Tuxedo, one can safely assume that the images and historical references are there for a reason. That we aren’t looking at things that were chosen at random.
Hoffman recently wrote that he believed “Tuxedo presents a clear, seemingly objective pathway from bottom to top, linking a never-ending plethora of ‘information’ derived from the artist’s sensory as well as mental observation. Basquiat invites us to go with him on a journey from cognitive consumption toward a ‘higher,’ transcendental reality.”
So like my interpretation, Hoffman thought Tuxedo is laid out in a way for the viewer to start at the bottom of the work and then move up, towards the crown, for a higher truth.
In early 1983, Jean-Michel was only twenty-two years old and still something of an up-and-coming artist. It would have been easy for him to take few risks with his art. But with Tuxedo, Jean-Michel was shaking things up, showing he had unorthodox ideas and a willingness to take chances.
Gagosian, based in L.A., loved Tuxedo. But when Jean-Michel offered the silkscreen to a group show in New York that was organized by gallery owner Tony Shafrazi, it was turned down. According to Fred Hoffman, Shafrazi wanted a painting, regardless of the striking imagery and substance of Tuxedo and the complicated, even innovative, process to get it done. It was just one example of how L.A., compared to New York, could be a more embracing, open-minded place for Jean-Michel.
For the March 1983 exhibit, Gagosian sent out a press release that didn’t use the word “graffiti,” although there’s a quick hint of urban subject matter:
The Larry Gagosian Gallery, located at 510 North Robertson, ½ block south of Melrose Avenue, is pleased to announce a show of recent paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat.
The works to be exhibited are large format acrylic paintings on canvas. The paintings are exceptional in the vigor and variety of their drafting, and the virtuosity of their mixed media technique. Heroism, royalty, and the street are prominent themes of the exhibit.
GALLERY HOURS: Tuesday through Saturday, 10 to 6.
Years later, art historian Dieter Buchhart wrote about the paintings in the exhibit: “In the 1983 series, Basquiat’s major themes are all present: music, anatomy, sport, comics, work, money, the economy, growth and decay, and the history of black people as well as art history. His manifold debate on socio-political issues from discrimination and prejudice to capitalism, market forces and suppression culminate in these pictures.”
The show was another big hit.
A few days after the opening, Los Angeles Times art critic Suzanne Muchnic wrote: “Basquiat’s [artworks] look like the real thing, not a painted interpretation, and therein lies the difference between his work and much New Wave or Neo-Expressionist painting. In a show of recent paintings, many of them done in the last four months while he has been living in Los Angeles, we see art that delivers a graphic punch and conveys a convincing air of urban anxiety.”
She added, “It does so with the tools of Abstract Expressionism and language. Current works seem less painterly than the batch he showed here about a year ago, but what they lack in surface interest they make up in brutish stylishness. Basquiat has a sure sense of vigorous shape and composition. His line, whether dug in, as in cryptic inscriptions, or languorous, as in ‘Study of the Back,’ is purposeful and knowing.”
It was a second rave – and both L.A. critics, unlike some of their powerful counterparts in New York, were willing to engage Jean-Michel’s work and try to understand what he was doing. (More on that a bit later.)
The exhibit was also a smash with Hollywood insiders and prominent art collectors, such as Eli and Edythe Broad, a wealthy L.A. couple who would create one of the most impressive private contemporary-art collections in the United States. The Broads bought paintings at that 1983 show, which featured such iconic works as Tuxedo; Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown); Hollywood Africans; Horn Players; Year of the Boar; and Eyes and Eggs.
“I remember taking Jean-Michel over to Eli and Edye’s,” Gagosian said at King Pleasure. “He was sitting there on the couch, smoking a joint. [Eli] was cool with it. He was kind of amused and fascinated by Jean-Michel, and I think they got along. They had a good rapport, as did Edye.”
Decades later, Eli and 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, including Horn Players; Obnoxious Liberals; Gold Griot; Eyes and Eggs; and a fantastic, untitled skull painting from 1981. Fred Hoffman told me, via email, that the artworks at the museum are among Jean-Michel’s very best. Perhaps tellingly, The Broad, based in L.A., owns more Basquiat paintings than New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art — combined.
Luckily, for my research purposes, I live in Los Angeles. So I’ve spent hours upon hours looking at The Broad’s top-notch Basquiat collection, and it’s easy to understand why Hoffman thinks so highly of the paintings. Gold Griot, for example, would be a showstopper at any museum.
For that, Jean-Michel used wooden slats from a broken fence outside his Venice studio in L.A. to create a large canvas of nine feet by six feet. He painted the slats gold, then composed on top of them a griot figure with an intricately detailed head that appears to be smiling. Its big, decorative eyes stare intensely at the viewer.
Gold Griot’s overall effect is life-stirring: you feel as if the figure is looking through your emotional defenses and staring straight into your naked soul. I’ve grown to enjoy the vulnerable connection, but the griot’s probing stare can initially feel uncomfortable, and you may not even understand why you feel uncomfortable. Then again, you may feel nothing at all, if you can’t or refuse or don’t know how to open up. (Just stand still for a few minutes, don’t think, don’t judge, don’t talk, and look straight into the griot’s eyes.)
Jean-Michel’s use of a griot is fascinating. Coming into prominence in the thirteenth century in West Africa, the griot is a highly respected leader – a real person – who acts as a kind of messenger, storyteller, historian, poet, advisor, and musician, passing along the history and values of a tribe or community from one generation to another through the oral tradition. What’s fascinating is that throughout his career, Jean-Michel was doing the same thing: documenting Black American history and culture through his art, passing along that history and culture through his art, and using a kind of poetry and music in his art to tell stories and convey truths about the Black American experience – past and present.
And Jean-Michel’s paintings continue to tell stories and histories and truths to one generation after another – and not just to Black Americans, but all Americans and anyone else who sees his work. One could say, with no exaggeration, that Jean-Michel was, and continues to be, a griot.
Griots appear in a number of Jean-Michel’s paintings, so he clearly identified with them. He may have even seen himself as one, but I’ve never read or heard anything in which he says so outright. The similarities fit, though. Very well, in fact.
The other works at The Broad are just as powerful as Gold Griot, especially if you pay attention to the eyes in each painting.
Take Untitled, a masterpiece from 1981. It depicts a large skull with what looks like scratched up windows in the rear of the skull, inviting a viewer to look inside a frazzled mind. A terrific idea on Jean-Michel’s part, but it’s the eyes that create the emotional heaviness of the painting – and give the skull life.
The left eye, of the skull, is framed in red and has some red in the pupil, indicating some kind of emotional disturbance. The right eye has nothing – just a black pupil looking defeated and somewhat dead. Around the eyes are scars and scratches, and both eyes seem to be looking down, giving the skull a look of forlornness and resignation. It’s the eyes that give the painting, even decades after it was created, a life-burdened, unsettling vibe.
Also, a skull is usually equated with death. If Jean-Michel had done nothing with the eyes, we would think we’re looking at the skull of a deceased person. But his use of the eyes changes that: we’re looking at something that’s living, not dead. And by using a skull, Jean-Michel stripped all physical fake outs (a bogus smile or a poker face) that can hide what a person is really thinking and feeling. Through the eyes and skull, he found a way to help us to see the undisguised truth of a person – the truth of that person’s emotional and intellectual states. Genius.
(In this one masterpiece, Jean-Michel shows that paintings can tell truths in ways that a photograph or video cannot. It’s something that the world-renowned artist Francis Bacon, when he was seventy-four or so, talked about in a documentary broadcast on the BBC in 1984 – three years after Basquiat painted the untitled skull portrait. “As the techniques of the cinema and all forms of recording have become better and better, so from the point of view of the painter, it’s made it more exciting but yet in a way more curtailed. Or the painter has to be more inventive to be able to put over the realism,” said Bacon, referring to his approach to painting a human figure. “He has to reinvent realism. He has to really wash the realism back onto the nervous system by his invention. Because there isn’t such a thing in painting any longer as natural realism. It has to be reinvented.” Jean-Michel understood that when he was only twenty.)
Then there’s Horn Players, a triptych that honors two of Jean-Michel’s favorite jazz musicians: Charlie “Bird” Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Parker, in the left panel, is blowing into his saxophone, with squiggly lines and musical notes coming out of it. Parker’s eyes stare straight ahead, looking relaxed, as if he’s in a trance as he plays the saxophone.
In the right panel, Dizzy Gillespie is holding his trumpet and appears to be listening to Parker. Gillespie’s eyes are mostly white with very small pupils, and they are framed by a pair of black-rimmed eyeglasses. So Dizzy, through the eyes, looks as if he’s surprised or blown away by the music that Parker is playing. A wonderful touch by Jean-Michel.
And there’s Eyes and Eggs, a massive portrait of a Black man who’s a short-order cook. He’s frying eggs in a skillet, and his eyes are large and ringed in red and staring straight ahead with a look of bewilderment or pleading. You get the feeling, through the eyes, that he’s anything but a happy man – and that he may feel helpless or trapped for some reason.
I’ll keep saying it: with Jean-Michel’s paintings, always look at the eyes. They not only set the emotional tone for a work, but they also help pack an everlasting wallop.
By the time the 1983 exhibit ended in April, Fred Hoffman had become a supportive, avuncular presence in Jean-Michel’s life. (Perhaps showing his appreciation, Basquiat painted a three-part portrait of Fred.) They 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 Gemini G.E.L., a well-known 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 routinely told interviewers that Rauschenberg, a Neo-Dadaist, was one of his favorite artists. Basquiat also said that when he was younger, Dadaism, an art movement from the early 20th century that rejected traditional artistic values and was a kind of response to World War I, very much interested him. (Jean-Michel’s “SAMO” street poetry-philosophy-art sure seems like Dada.)
Rauschenberg and Jean-Michel actually shared a process of using found items to create works of art. Such as turning a discarded window into a painting or transforming an abandoned TV into a sculpture – something the teenaged Basquiat, who didn’t have the money for paints and canvases, pulled off beautifully…
Whenever Hoffman writes or talks about Jean-Michel, you quickly sense a man who cared deeply about his friend and would do anything for him. You also realize that Hoffman usually has a 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 2011 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.
“For many artists,” Drohojowska-Philp wrote, “the city’s tenuous attachment to history and tradition translated as openness to fresh ideas.”
Explaining the difference between New York and Los Angeles, the L.A.-based artist John Baldessari told writer Amy Newman, “I remember taking mescaline with Bob Smithson and Tony Shafrazi and walking around West Broadway and Canal [in New York City] just laughing our heads off… [It was] very much in the air about who did what first – this really linear sort of art history. I remember one night talking about some idea and everybody looking up and saying, ‘Yes, but how would that fit into art history?’ I felt, who the fuck cares, you know, just do it. But you didn’t have that attitude in New York.”
With that kind of mindset in L.A., white and African American artists started up their own scenes with their own exhibition spaces. 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 items. 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, the freedom of L.A.’s art scene was still there – 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 broken-down, 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 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, Jean-Michel 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); 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 (Jean-Michel didn’t have a driver’s license); shop for designer ties, shirts, and pants 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 paint one fantastic work after another.
“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, “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.”
With work completed, Davis often hit the town with Basquiat, who loved L.A.’s burgeoning hip-hop scene.
“One of my favorite things was to just go out dancing with Jean-Michel,” she said at King Pleasure. “He was one of the best dancers ever. Everywhere you went with him, it was like you were the center of attention. He would create a scene everywhere you went.”
In addition to the good vibes of L.A., Jean-Michel could also make use of the city’s vivid light. “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, L.A.’s unique light could inject even more energy into his paintings. In fact, I’ve always thought that the brilliant blue that Jean-Michel often used in his work — a brilliant blue that instantly grabs both your soul and your eyeballs — was the exact blue of the L.A. sky…
But the freedom thing in L.A. was something that not only artists felt. Over the years, I’ve interviewed business 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 believed L.A. was more of a meritocracy than New York; and they felt unshackled so they could more easily take chances. In short, they felt free.
Knowing all that, it’s no surprise that Jean-Michel, an unwavering rebel who always demanded freedom in his life and work, enjoyed L.A. — and flourished in it. He was nurtured and respected, and he was FREEEEEE!!!!!!
Patrick Range McDonald is a veteran, award-winning investigative journalist based in Los Angeles, California.