Basquiat at Museum of Fine Arts

Tuesday, 22 November 2005 10:39

HOUSTON, TX.- Basquiat, an exhibition that examines and explicates the brilliant, mesmerizing works of Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), whose meteoric career coincided with the emergence of hip-hop culture and the era of artist as celebrity at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Comprising more than 100 paintings and drawings from collections worldwide. The national tour of Basquiat is sponsored by JPMorgan Chase. In an early review of the exhibition, the New York Times summarized the reasons for the ongoing fascination with the artist’s work: “…Basquiat’s achievement, produced during a truncated but astoundingly prolific career, has the almost too classic prerequisites of greatness: an indelible yet infinitely flexible visual style that cannibalizes the past, reflects its own time and stays fresh and relevant as it moves into the future.” Born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Haitian father and Puerto Rican-American mother, Basquiat was fluent in French, Spanish, and English. From an early age he was a voracious learner with a precocious talent for drawing. While his parents both encouraged his artistic interests, his mother assumed the active role of taking him on weekly visits to New York’s major museums and supplying him with art books and supplies. Determined to become famous, Basquiat left his family’s home in 1978 to immerse himself in the newly explosive culture of New York’s East Village. He first gained quasi-recognition for the cryptic graffiti poetry he sprayed on the walls of Lower Manhattan under the pseudonym SAMO. In 1981, when he was 20, Basquiat burst upon the art scene under his own name. Although his initial efforts were somewhat tentative, Basquiat quickly developed a complex, pictorially sophisticated mature style. A naturally gifted draftsman, he soon developed into a radically innovative colorist as well. By the age of 21, he had already had five important solo exhibitions and had been included in the prestigious Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany. He remains the youngest artist ever exhibited in Documenta. In the frenzied art market of the 1980s, Basquiat’s work sold briskly to collectors in both Europe and America. During the recession of the early 1990s, while most artists of the 80s either dropped from sight or sold their work for much lower prices than just a few years before, prices for Basquiat’s work rose steadily. But because museums were slow to respond, almost all his major work is held in private collections. Basquiat’s work today remains fresh, challenging, and enigmatic. In his career of just under a decade, he created a distinct style of painting that involved language, a set of repeated personal symbols, and a rhythmic harmony of surface based on a loosely gridded picture plane. Like the Surrealists, Basquiat created his imagery in a freely associative collage manner, arbitrarily combining words with unrelated images. In another aesthetic format, he created a contemporary version of traditional icon painting, but with secular subjects: African-American musicians and athletes who had broken barriers to become respected figures in popular culture. Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker were among his subjects. “Basquiat’s brilliant sense of pictorial composition is evident throughout his oeuvre, from the austere word drawings through his astonishingly complex multi-panel paintings,” said Barry Walker, curator of modern and contemporary art and of prints and drawings at the MFAH. “Although he packed the works with information, his art is always open to multiple interpretations. This ambiguity of meaning fuels the continued fascination with his work. Like Jack Kerouac, Mark Twain, or Jackson Pollock, Basquiat is truly an American original.”

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