Brooklyn salutes native son Basquiat

NEW YORK, March 28 (UPI) -- Painter Jean-Michel Basquiat may have died young in 1988, but his art lives on, bringing top prices for 1980s art at auction and receiving the accolades of a retrospective exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum as the prelude to a national tour.

Basquiat (1960-1988) is being honored as a native son of Brooklyn with a show of 70 paintings and 50 works on paper on loan from U.S. and European collections. It will run through June 5, then travel to Los Angeles, opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art July 15, and to Houston for exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts beginning Nov. 18.

At the time the artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage began his career as a graffiti artist in the late 1970s, his art was referred to as "punk" art, but he is now regarded as a neo-Expressionist forerunner of the "hip-hop" art movement. The retrospective organized by the Brooklyn Museum is the most comprehensive evaluation of Basquiat since a 1992 show at the New York's Whitney Museum. It has wall texts in English, French and Spanish, the languages Basquiat spoke.

The artist was enjoying international acclaim when he became hooked on heroin in the mid-1980s and his proliferate output began to flag, although he never stopped painting until the day of his death of an overdose in 1988 at age 27. One of the best works in the show is dated 1988 and is displayed in the final gallery of the two-floor exhibition.

It is a large apocalyptic painting titled "Exu," his conception of the Trickster God of the African Yoruba religion. The image of the deity wearing the mask of a vicious fox surrounded by multiple eyes is powerfully depicted in acrylic and oil paintstick so hastily and energetically applied to white canvas that it almost seems to leap off the wall.

Basquiat was self-taught, and his cryptic graffiti poetry, much of it applied to buildings on Manhattan's Lower East Side, was signed SAMO, short for "same old, same old." There is one rare example of this early graffiti in the show, rescued intact from a wall, and several examples of paintings applied to found doors and windows, whose panels form frames for his work.

By his late teens Basquiat had emerged from anonymity with an original body of work that won him five one-person exhibitions by the time he was 21 and caught the eye of Andy Warhol. He acquired his own studio in 1981 and began turning out paintings at a rapid pace showing many cultural influences ranging from Leonardo da Vinci to Cy Twombly.

Warhol, the father of Pop art, collaborated with Basquiat on several of the works in the show, laying down a silk screen field over which Basquiat painted. They did dozens of such paintings, sometimes including Italian-born artist Francesco Clemente in their creation. Warhol's death in 1987, soon after he dropped Basquiat because of his drug addiction, had severe emotional impact on his young protégé.

The show is chronologically hung, but Basquiat's favorite themes, invariably focused on black men, are repeated throughout the eight years of artwork surveyed. These include spooky skeletal anatomical studies that resemble X-rays of human body arts and heroic figures wearing halos or crowns (Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Cassius Clay, Hank Aaron).

One of the most arresting of these is "St. Joe Louis Surrounded by Snakes," a fairly good likeness of the haloed prizefighter wearing black gloves and surrounded by five sycophants.

There are two important series of thematically connected paintings in the show. The Griot series, dating to 1984, depicts in poetic terms masked men and refers to a cultural figure who perpetuates and communicates history and tradition of West African tribal communities through storytelling and song. The best of these is "Gold Griot," painted on gilded wooden slats laid horizontally.

The other series of 32 paintings, ranging from imagery to printed aphorisms or a mixture of both, is called the Daros Suite because it is owned by a Swiss collector of that name. Taken as a whole, these paintings are representative of Basquiat's nimble mentality and encyclopedic acquaintance with many different cultures and eras of history.

Some of these refer to the social contemporary inequities of U.S. society, which concerned Basquiat along with the cruelties of colonial rule in its suppression of black societies. One of his most interesting references to black bondage is in the form of two paintings inspired by Edouard Manet's masterpiece, "Olympia," in Paris' Louvre Museum.

It separates the figure of the nude French courtesan reclining in bed from the figure of the black woman servant who is bringing Olympia her morning coffee. It is as though the artist is freeing the maid from servitude. Such subtleties are common to Basquiat's art and make the effort of sustained scrutiny worthwhile.

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