The exhibition of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s life work was shown at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville from last October to January and was one of the museum’s most successful shows to date. So popular, that I gave up on queuing in the freezing cold twice and didn’t get to see it until its last week. If I’m honest I almost considered just pretending I’d seen it, but knew I wouldn’t be able to live with the secret.
I don’t like to stereotype but Parisians don’t really do queuing and find any way possible to avoid it (usually by really obviously pushing in). So when you see hundreds of people obediently queuing every day for three months in winter, you know it’s an unmissable show.
Every minute I waited in the icy rain was worth it. Basquiat is of legend-status. By the time he died of a heroine overdose at the age of 27, he had climbed his way up from the runaway of an abusive home to a world-known, world-loved artist. His life covered off so many clichés; rags-to-riches, the American Dream, a bright flame extinguished to soon, which is why there’s no surprise there are a number of films telling his story.
Although a fast route to fame, it wasn’t an easy climb and required just a little help from drug dealing, graffiti poetry and the new friends he had made in high places. A lot of Basquiat’s success was also down to his intelligence. Despite being celebrated for his style and cool, he was more than a pretty face. To give you an idea of his brains, he was fluent in French, Spanish and English by the time he was eleven, thanks to his Puerto Rican and Haitian heritage. His works constantly made statements about and references to politics, history and literature, often written out in chart form or madly scribbled over a huge canvas as if he was some kind of medium from the spirit world.
Basquiat had looks, style, charm, brains, talent, but despite having it all, about half-way through his career it all started to spiral downwards. Right about the time when he became best mates with his hero; Andy Warhol. The moral of the story? Never hang out with someone who has crazier hair than you.
A whole section of the exhibition was dedicated to the work that came from the Basquiat-Warhol collaboration. They didn’t simply exhibit together; they actually collaborated on the same paintings. The exhibition was a flop, leaving their new friendship in tatters and they reportedly never spoke again. Warhol died the year after and from then on Basquiat’s paintings seemed to run out of steam. They lacked energy and seemed to be more a channel for junkie lethargy and paranoia than the outlet of a mad genius that had come before.
For me Basquiat’s best work came from the beginning of his career. The collection of work at the start of the exhibition really showed what had made Basquiat’s art so exciting and proved him to be a talented artist and not just a charmer with a good story. Every piece of art from 1982 was unique, painted on a different material, representing a different idea, using a whole different spectrum of colours. It was as if he had so much to get out of his head and someone had locked him in a room for a year with nothing but paints and let it all kick-off. For me this is the anti-Warhol. I would’ve been content to have just seen this and left, but something made me stay, something being the queuing I’d done to get in and the 11 Euro entry fee!
"The Imaginary Historian"
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