Hyped to Death
The short life of Jean-Michel Basquiat, graffiti artist turned gallery commodity.
A Basquiat Gallery: Photo Reproductions of the Work of Jean Michel Basquiat Obituary: Jean Michel Basquiat (August 15, 1988) New Art, New Money: A New York Times Magazine Profile of Jean Michel Basquiat (February 10, 1985) First Chapter: 'Basquiat'
By PATRICIA BOSWORTH
A Quick Killing in Art.
By Phoebe Hoban.
Illustrated. 385 pp. New York:
hoebe Hoban leaves little to the imagination in her unsettling biography of the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. Maybe that is as it should be, since Basquiat, who died in 1988 of a drug overdose at the age of 27, was emblematic of an age of mass media and a culture of reproduction in which nothing is left to dream over or speculate about -- the sound bite is all.
Basquiat began as a teen-age graffiti artist, ''Samo,'' who scrawled cryptic sayings on public buildings around Manhattan. Eventually he scavenged and recycled television images, comic-book heroes, fragments from the Bible, slogans; he appropriated everything into his work. Today, critics remain divided about his value. Robert Hughes maintains: ''He seemed to have some kind of graphic zip. But the stuff became incredibly repetitious.'' However, Arthur Danto insists: ''I thought the way he put paint on canvas was a gift. Basquiat had not just an eye, but a touch. . . . He left behind a substantial body of work, and would have been a significant painter in any era.''
Basquiat's meteoric rise and fall coincided with the emergence of other artists, like Julian Schnabel and David Salle, who were producing vast quantities of work very quickly to satisfy the inflated art market of the 1980's. ''Basquiat's life spanned an historic shift in the art world,'' Hoban writes, ''from Pop to neo-Expressionism, from hip to hype.'' Hype is the operative word. Hype and its nasty manipulations are explored ad infinitum in this book. Hype made Basquiat, and hype distorted his career. The greedy art dealers who bought and sold and resold his work had voracious appetites coupled with very short attention spans.
''Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art'' is not an authorized biography. It has not been endorsed by Basquiat's father, Gerald, or by his mother, Matilde. But they talked, anyway, and so have scores of other people close to Basquiat -- friends, teachers, colleagues, dealers, collectors, drug pushers and lovers (including Madonna). The resulting vignettes read like pulp fiction. ''He was dark, and soft and passionate,'' one lover told Hoban. He enjoyed both sexes.
Basquiat was born in Park Slope, Brooklyn, on Dec. 22, 1960. His father was an accountant, originally from Haiti, a womanizer who loved jazz and tennis. Basquiat's mother was from Puerto Rico. Exotic and cultivated, she spoke French, Spanish and English and took her son to theater and museums. By the time he was 4, Hoban reports, he was drawing maniacally. A car hit him when he was a small boy, and his spleen was removed. While he was hospitalized, his mother gave him a copy of Gray's Anatomy. Later he would make visual references to that book in his paintings, as well as to his accident, and he would also refer to another favorite book, ''Junky,'' by William Burroughs.
His parents' marriage broke up when Jean-Michel was 7, after his mother began suffering from depression. Jean-Michel and his two sisters, Lisane and Jeanine, were subsequently raised by their father in a brownstone in Boerum Hill. Hoban writes that his father beat Jean-Michel constantly and once stabbed the boy in the buttock (Basquiat later claimed the attack came after he was caught having sex with a male cousin). In school, he drew all the time. Teachers remembered him as uncommonly talented but very angry.
At 15, he ran away from home and lived in Washington Square Park, tripping on LSD and other drugs. To support himself, he sold painted T-shirts and handmade postcards on West Broadway, and he made friends with other struggling young artists like Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf. The three became part of the graffiti movement that flourished in the East Village in the late 1970's and was part of an energizing street culture. But Basquiat's graffiti stood out -- witty, poetic ''Samo'' sayings decorated with a copyright logo, which he scrawled all over SoHo and TriBeCa. Everybody loved Samo. ''It's a tool for mocking bogusness,'' Basquiat would say. He gained an underground celebrity.
His first big break came in a 1981 show in which his work created a stir: 15 pieces on found lumber and foam rubber -- childlike drawings, cars, cartoon characters, ''kind of smeared, and everything was very violent and frenetic,'' in the words of one viewer. The paintings sold immediately, and the demand for Basquiats began. Everyone wanted to buy one. They sold faster than he could paint them, at $5,000 to $10,000 apiece. He seemed to be living his paintings. He slept on them, walked over them, ate on them, scribbled phone numbers on them, made lists. There would be a mound of cocaine on a table near his paint buckets. The smell of marijuana was in the air. Collectors would come and gawk, and then, as one of them told Hoban, ''He quickly became a commodity: 'Come and watch the artist perform.' ''
In March 1982 he had a sold-out show that garnered much attention from the news media. He was immediately tapped by Larry Gagosian, the first of a series of powerful art dealers who wheeled and dealed for him. Hoban writes that Gagosian, whose clients included Si Newhouse and David Geffen, knew he could make a lot of money on Basquiat. Meanwhile, Basquiat's output was phenomenal, and he continued to produce, fueled by drugs. Sometimes he would complete up to eight paintings a week. But he would fly into rages about being pressured to paint; sometimes he slashed his canvases to bits.
Gagosian arranged for him to have a show in Los Angeles in April 1982. Every painting was sold in a matter of minutes. By November, he had another show at the Fun Gallery in New York, some of the best paintings he ever did, with ''a rough energy and nasty edge,'' Hoban writes. There were portraits of his heroes -- Charlie Parker, Jackie Robinson, ''St. Joe Louis, surrounded by snakes.'' In other paintings, she writes, ''boys never become men, they become skeletons and skulls. . . . Basquiat is obsessed with deconstructing the images and language of his fragmented world.'' Basquiat secretly hid some of his best work so it could not be sold. The canvases were found after his death, in a warehouse in Washington Heights.
At the heart of this book is the story of Basquiat's collaboration with Andy Warhol, orchestrated by Bruno Bischofberger, the quintessential art dealer of the 1980's, who handled Basquiat's work worldwide. He was a master of hype and buying art in bulk, and organized shows for Basquiat in Tokyo, Paris and Madrid. (Today, he owns the best collection of Basquiat.) Bischofberger persuaded Warhol to work with Basquiat. Warhol was inspired by Basquiat's energy and youth. Basquiat idolized Warhol -- the artist who more than any other seemed to embody contemporary culture. He desperately needed and wanted Warhol's approval. The two became inseparable, working and partying together for months. Warhol never took drugs; he was appalled and fascinated by Basquiat's excesses.
Their joint show at Tony Shafrazi's gallery in September 1985 was a glittering media event, followed by a wild, noisy party at the Palladium, but the show itself drew universal pans. ''Everything . . . is infused with banality,'' one critic wrote. ''The real question is, who is using whom here?''
The end of the friendship came about because Warhol could not deal with Basquiat's drug addiction. And, in the final analysis, Hoban is telling the story of a drug addict. Her best passages reflect the addict's life, his hallucinations, his nocturnal wanderings, his hunger for the needle.
A not-so-minor quibble: Much of this book seems disorganized. Although Hoban, a magazine journalist writing her first book, is a terrific reporter, she needed to shape her wonderful research and put everything into proper perspective. Key elements of the great story she has unearthed lie buried beneath undigested material.
That said, the book remains compulsively readable. There is enormous value in it, especially in Hoban's depiction of the glitzy 1980's art world, which is sharply etched and deadly accurate. She describes a place where sex, imagination and intelligence have been so brutalized by greed and celebrity the cumulative effect is numbing.
Basquiat himself maintained that all he wanted was to be famous. He could learn to draw later, he said. He got his wish, of course, but his dream of fame turned into a nightmare.