American graffiti

National Review, Dec 14, 1992 by James Gardner

Jean-Michel BASQUIAT spent most of his career as a hasbeen--a remarkable achievement if you consider that he was only 27 when he OD'd on heroin. In the decade prior to that, however, he had moved from the periphery of the art world to 'its very center before slipping, by swift degrees, into marginalized irrelevance. For most of the Eighties the only opinion you really needed if you wanted to sound informed about contemporary painting (and who didn't?) was that Basquiat's latest productions lacked the spontaneity and freshness of his earlier works. His paintings continued to sell and he was still being written about, but the listless gaze of the art world was now looking for fresher meat.

His overdose four years ago changed all that. Death had turned him into a finite commodity. Death might not alter the quality of his work, but it certainly affected their quantity. Suddenly the works of this all-too-prolific artist started to feel rare indeed. SoHo awoke to what had been lost. No more would the wild child of the art world be shooting up in Annina Nosei's basement. No more would he be spilling coffee on critics or vomiting into the latrines of the Mudd Club. There was the vague certitude that they, whoever they were, had done this to him, that he had been done in by a cold, uncaring world that hated youth and genius and all that. His death cried out for noisy, fulsome piaculation, and the stream of eulogies has been flowing ever since.

The present retrospective at New York's Whitney Museum is the final stage in the apotheosis of JeanMichel Basquiat. With this exhibition he passos into the art-historical pantheon, from which eminence he need no longer abide the questions of a doubting public. The Whitney's large and pompous proceedings put the subject to bed with full honors in a catalogue tumid with footnotes and bibliographies and scholarly apparatus. Some idea of the objectivity of the essays will be suggested by Rene Ricard's observation, on page 49, that "[Basquiat] remains wrapped in the silent purple toga of Immortality."

Basquiat surfed to prominence on the neo-Expressionist wave that marked the Eighties' reaction against the cool, rarefied conceptualism of the Seventies. His was an art of anger and rebellion, we were told, of graffiti images and street slang. Everything about this art was designed to keep you guessing, to keep you hoping, and sometimes believing, that you were seeing more than you really were seeing. Basquiat was anomaly made flesh: a graffiti artist fully aware of the European avant garde, a defacer of public property who had attended a private school, a formalist who raised the banner of social protest, a gritty black presence in the conspicuously white world of SoHo.

It was this enigmatic lack of focus that lent him, while he lived, the semblance of something more than ever met the eye. In an early work like Aaron I, depicting a brutally crude male head surrounded by childish renderings of cars, one finds the crazed and jagged Crayola scribblings of Cy Twombly allied to Francis Bacon's perspectives and the colorism of Jasper Johns. A later work like Philistines, whose title of course is ironic, depicts three spikily abstracted skeletons whose manic gaze confronts the viewer with the ghosts of Jean Dubuffet and the late Picasso. The quite pleasant L.A. Painting (1982), with its cinemascopic expanse of swimming pool blue and tawny yellow, recalls any number of Color Field abstractionists from the Fifties and early Sixties. To enhance this formal weightiness, in almost all of Basquiat's paintings, the viewer is given a lot to read, disconnected words and phrases like "Gangsterism," "Colonization: Part Two in a Series," "Asecticism" [sic], and "Sugar Coated Corn Puffs." If you find yourself asking what all of this is supposed to mean, you are probably temperamentally unsuited to the enjoyment of his art.

I have been returning periodically to Basquiat for close to ten years, each time hoping to see some point in him that others saw but that had eluded me. I hereby renounce the effort. Surely there are things in the Whitney retrospective which may in part be approved. In principle, there is nothing wrong with the formal premises of these paintings. Even if they cannot survive comparison with the works from which they filch their pictorial underpinnings, at least they can be judged by the same criteria of composition, color, and drawing. Given the present affection for floating basketballs and burping cathode ray tubes, this seems positively reactionary. But in truth Basquiat's paintings are a tangle of competing forms of mediocrity. In some pain-tings the colors work well, in others they collapse into complete arbitrariness. The same could be said for the draftsmanship and composition. In no one work do all the elements effortlessly come together. This is why Basquiat never rises to equality with any of the sources of his inspiration.

The appeal of Basquiat's paintings lies elsewhere. Like so much that becomes fashionable, this art began to appeal through its newness, through the crisp acidity of its acrylic, through the manifest fact of its bigness. Soon it was being exhibited in the right museums and the right galleries and the right living rooms in New York and L.A. and Cologne, until it started to seem a classic of its kind, inscrutable, definitive unto itself. And that is how things stand now. Given all the hype and all the fluid capital that have been poured into these paintings, we can confidently predict that they will not be sinking soon into that oblivion to which they are ultimately condemned.