Jean-Michel Basquiat. Say his name.
It is a name that lends itse well to a dead white, French man whose post-expressionist works would one day show up in a museum around Europe. Perhaps the last person to discover his work, I was surprised to accidentally stumble upon the ‘Now is the Time’ exhibit at the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Low and behold Jean-Michel Basquiat is not a dead French man but possibly the most famous Black American painter of the 21st century. Or, according to the New York City art world of the 80s, the only black painter who, by the time of his death in 1988, had ever significantly influenced painting.
Basquiat’s Early Work
Before his success in the New York art scene, Basquiat and his friend Al Diaz became infamous for tagging walls around New York from 1978 to 1980 as SAMO (a.k.a Same Old Shit). Their bizarre poetry railed against corporate America and they were some of the first graffiti artists to spread subversive messages and reclaim public space for free thought. These types of messages would later appear in the paintings Basquiat authored.
After several small shows, art gallery owner Annina Nosei took notice of Basquiat who had recently gone from scrawling on walls to scrawling on canvas. She gave Basquiat a basement studio and the supplies to start making large scale paintings. The paintings sold out on the opening night of the show at her gallery, making him 200 000$. Basquiat was soon among the elite of the art world but would often find it impossible to hail a taxi in New York.
Basquiat and the death of Michael Stewart
In his chaotic canvases we find the black man as hero but also as a deeply suffering human, conflicted with his place in modern America. The show is at times playful and at times intensely dark; one of the works it features, “Defacement: The Death of Micheal Stewart” shows us how little has changed for the black man in America since Basquiat’s time, placing him so clearly in the here and now.
When Basquiat was moonlighting as Samo, cops beat a young black man named Michael Stewart to deaths for painting graffiti in a New York subway station. In response, Jean-Michel painted a rendering of the incident. In the work a shadowed figure contrasts with the bright colours of cartoonish officers shown beating him with batons. A nameless, faceless black man is named only in the piece’s title. Upon hearing about the incident, Basquiat’s response was, “It could have been me.”
Samos’ Process
In the documentary The Radiant Child Basquiat says he always worked with music on, or the television blaring. The constant input of the 80s brought out his expression. On his canvas you find little snippets of how we process information; the disconnected and crossed out words reflect how the brain processes the never ending data stream we find today. The blank page a place a nonsensical poetry that when read together tells a story. Basquiat was a vehicle that translated the feeling and reality of the street through his art. In his style you see the bold, beautiful characters a child might draw, with the assurance of an artist whose mind who registered everything it expressed.
A Painter for Modern Times
In “Defacement”, Jean-Miche captures an all too common event in American history – a black man dying at the hands of the cops. In the painting’s title he gives homage to the dead but the lifeless, expressionless black figure represents the number of nameless dead in Basquiat’s time. While Basquiat achieved fame in the art world of the elite, his paintings remain accessible and force us to question both the world he lived in, and the one we do. “The Death of Michael Stewart” calls on us to speak about the violence that still exists for the black man in America. When we say Jean-Michel’s name we should also hear Michael Stewart’s name and the names of the thousands of other black people killed in America since Basquiat’s death. Do not mistake him for a dead white French man, but take some time to recognize his place in history.