Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Sat Sep 04, 2010 7:44 pm 
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Live fast die young and leave 1,000 paintings worth millions

Tamra Davis' biographical documentary depicts the meteoric rise and sudden fall of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the gifted and undeniably charismatic Afro-Latino-American graffiti writer from the streets of New York (his mother was Puerto Rican and his father an accountant of Haitian descent) who became a world-famous millionaire artist in his early twenties and died of a heroin overdose at 27. What Lee Siegel of the NY Observer says (a common remark) is true: Davis' film is "sensitive and intelligent" (like its subject) but also "carefully selective and frankly worshipful." It's a celebration and a bit of a lament. It does not dwell on the drug use till toward the end, though it does not hide it either since it describes how it brought him down.

Most of all Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child is a year-by-year chronicle of the essential creative period of the short life and a feast of image and sound. Growing out of a short interview film Davis made in LA in 1985, three years before the artist's death, a reference point returned to throughout, it's expanded with a wealth of archival materials and interviews, dozens of images of Basquiat at work, his gallery shows, and shots of individual paintings and drawings -- each helpfully identified by title and other details. In the background is a soundtrack built out of music Jean-Michel incessantly listened to when he worked (while also watching television and reading magazines and books), from Bebop to Ravel's Bolero to Adam Horovitz, Afrika Bambaataa, the Talking Heads and Soul Sonic Force (but most of all the Bebop greats, Gillespie, Parker, Coltrane, Davis, African-American geniuses themselves and among his greatest inspirations).

Though a lot of the archival footage and interviews are fuzzy, gnarly stuff, the paintings shine forth in all their dazzling color and invention. I warn you, this review is going to be the effusion of an enthusiast. In the Eighties I thought maybe Basquiat's work was just inventive, witty eye candy, but the huge retrospective of his work that debuted at the Brooklyn Museum in 2005 convinced me that this was and is a monster talent as well as an artist of prodigious drive and energy. This film should inspire new fans. There was a cult and superstar hype, but Jean-Michel was also the real deal, one of the most remarkable artistic talents of the second half of the twentieth century, with gifts as concentrated and rich as one of the English romantic poets (Shelley died at 30, Keats at 25). Despite only working for a handful of years, he left behind, according to this film, a thousand paintings and a thousand prints. Many of the paintings are large, and all of them are astonishing. Though the museum establishment shunned him when he was alive and the critic Hilton Kramer declared his talent minuscule, his reputation and the value of his work keep growing. In 2008 Lars Ulrich of Metallica sold a big Basquiat at auction for $14 million.

Basquiat grew up in Brooklyn in what's described as an "upper middle class" family, his parents' origins meaning he spoke and read English, French, Creole, and Spanish before his teens. Though his mature work refers to many schools of art including the Renaissance, the School of Paris and Abstract Expressionism and when young he planned to become a cartoonist, his base style, like the work of Jean Dubuffet, an artist among many his work alludes to, exudes a trademark faux primitivism that accesses the precocious drawings of his own childhood. The boy's mother was periodically hospitalized for mental problems but nonetheless took him on frequent museum visits. He most distinctly remembers seeing Picasso's "Guernica" at eleven. He tells Tamra Davis in the interview that his earliest memory was being hit by a car when he was "seven or eight." He nearly died and underwent surgery and had his spleen removed. In this hospital his mother brought him a copy of Gray's Anatomy, whose anatomical images often appeared later in his paintings. Basquiat's paintings throughout his career constantly use words and symbols and are full of references, both overt and slyly hidden, to literature and history, Afriacan-American experience and its ironies.

At seventeen, before his senior year of high, school Jean-Michel ran away decisively from home and lived on the streets of Manhattan or with friends. At this time he became known as the graffiti artist SAMO (from the black expression "samo-samo," same old/same old, which white people in the film repeatedly mispronounce to rhyme with Black Sambo), writing mysterious phrases on the wall. With no money till he sold a postcard or a painting, he still put himself at the center of the hip NYC early Eighties scene, appearing on Style man Glenn O'Brien's cable TV show, dancing and hanging out at the stylish Mudd Club, starting his own dada band, Gray. His early girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk describes these days as do Fab Five Freddy and O'Brien.

Some of these events, like the moment when the ambitious young SAMO, who was bent on becoming famous, went up to Andy Warhol in a restaurant and sold him some of his painted postcards, are dramatized in older Eighties art superstar Julian Schnabel's witty 1996 debut film Basquiat, a career launching pad for Jeffrey Wright (who plays Jean-Michel), in which David Bowie is a droll Andy Warhol and Dennis Hopper is the Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger, later Basquiat's main dealer, along with LA dealer Larry Gagosian. They were at the table when Basquiat sold Warhol the postcards. Later he was to have Warhol to himself.

It was Annina Nosei, however, who got him started as a painter. He had been in a big Lower Manhattan art show that featured his work on one wall and people began to recognize his talent, but he had no money to buy canvas. Learning of this, Nosei set up a spacious studio for him in the basement of her SoHo gallery with all the paint and canvases he needed. The documentary recounts how driven and intense a worker Jean-Michel was. If he didn't make it in early in the morning, he'd apologize to Nosei. This was in 1981. He was 21. His painting career lasted six years. He was the center of an active social and art scene of the Eighties and he had many girlfriends, for a time including Madonna (not interviewed, but quoted as saying that he was one person whom she most envied, but that he was too delicate and sensitive for this world). Basquiat's rise also meant encountering racism, a feeling that he was the token black, the white elite's darling, that when they called him a "wild child" they were imagining a monkey (this is in the Davis interview). He was celebrated and his fame grew international. "The Radiant Child" was the title of an early celebratory essay about Basquiat in Artforum by René Ricard that nurtured his reputation and image. But he lacked the tools or maturity to deal with the fame, the money, the jealousies, and the detractors.

From there on events are too fast and intense to recount. His first show sold out, and all the subsequent ones, except for the one showing his collaborative paintings made with Andy Warhol. Eventually Jean-Michel and Warhol became so close that when Warhol's untimely death came at 58, after they had fallen out following the failed collaboration, the younger artist took it hard. It's from that time that his drug use spiraled out of control and he went downhill. There are many tributes to the artist from collectors, museum people, critics, and friends. One walks out of the film saddened but exhilarated at the adrenalin rush exposure to a such concentrated and exciting talent provides. This is an important document of the art of our times, and hence one of the year's important documentaries.

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Davis first showed her interview by itself at the time of the 2005 Basquiat retrospective, in Los Angeles. This much enlarged film premiered at Sundance. It is distributed by Arthouse Films and debuted theatrically at Film Forum in New York.

Wikipedia entry, Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Film trailer.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.


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