Jean-Michael Basquiat's Unsettling Genius on Display in L.A. Show

By Nicholas F. Benton

LOS ANGELES — Saturday marked the opening of the first-ever comprehensive exhibition of the works of controversial artist Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown Los Angeles. Lines extended for blocks of intrigued mostly-hip and younger types drawn to the unique life and work of this once-Manhattan homeless young artist of Haitian descent who died of a heroin overdose at age 27 at the height of his fame.

The massive assembly of the works, accomplished by former Basquiat friend and art curator Fred Hoffman, was accompanied by a video documentary of one of the few seriously-revealing interviews with the artist.

The show, which was first held in Brooklyn this spring, runs through October 10 before being moved for a third exhibition in Houston, Texas beginning in November.

Basquiat, who often collaborated with Andy Warhol from 1983 until Warhol’s death in 1987, began his art career by drawing graffiti with a friend on subway trains in New York City that was signed SAMO (standing for “same old s..t”). This was after he left home and lived for weeks on the streets of lower Manhattan in 1977.

He then sold hand painted postcards and T-shirts, but by 1980 his talent began to be recognized, and arrangements were made for public exhibitions of his art. He continued to exhibit his works in New York City and Europe, where his following grew quickly. By December 1981, his works drew a major article in Artforum, and his fame grew from there.

The MOCA exhibition promotion includes the following comment: “Jean-Michel Basquiat’s brilliant and dramatic artworks speak to a time in the grip of extraordinary change: the advent of hip-hop, the `80s art boom and the revival of painting in the United States. An artist of stirring emotional depth, Basquiat once said that his main themes were ‘kings, heroes, and the street.’ He is recognized for the unique iconography he developed from urban culture, sports heroes and jazz legends, as well as his ability to break down the boundaries between painting, text and drawing.”

The over 100 works collected for the exhibition show the inner workings of a brilliant but highly-alienated person who stands outside of society looking in with a combination of anger, sharp criticism and a profoundly sad undercurrent.

His graffiti-like works reflect the kind of man who is too smart to dismiss the limitations of the severe boundary conditions of his life, like the homeless person who was once a brilliant scientist but could not shake a severe mental disorder or drug addiction.

Therefore, the works are random and eclectic, mixing angry and grotesque figures with talent-laden scribbles of texts, slogans, brand names and logos and free associations.

These drawings are not “beautiful.” None of the faces or human figures even remotely resemble beauty. They are angry and tortured, distorted cartoon-like manifestations of an interior state of mind.

But there is a compelling honesty in all of this. It resembles in form the personal journals of marginal and deeply alienated persons I have known, mixing sometimes cogent insights with slogans and doodles that converge on real art.

Basquiat was ultimately not above the alienation he depicted so graphically in his works. Struggling with his own inner demons that perhaps drove his talent, he exhibited paranoia and ultimately failed to lick his heroin addiction, even as those around him let him be for the sake of his commercial and artistic value.

As with those who grow up on the street, or with a too intimate knowledge of it, one can never be sure whether he or she is dealing with the truly honest or a hustle, and that goes for the street person, him or herself, as well. How did Basquiat react to the fact that every time he put his pen or brush to a canvass, no matter how seemingly bizarre or senseless, it would turn to instant gold in the hands of dealers, doters and sycophants?

One wonders if he did not become the victim of his own rote formula for artistic success, trapped in a world apart from a society that only worshipped his demons.

You may e-mail Nicholas F. Benton by clicking here.