Basquiat: Still Unequaled

Speaking of word-inclusive art, how about the work of the gone-too-soon genius Jean-Michel Basquiat? A big retrospective at the Barbican in London has images of some of his best work popping up all over the web. Basquiat started out scrawling cryptic sayings and observations on the building walls of NYC. He and his partner Al Diaz didn't stylize the words like graffiti artists did. They just put them up there straight and unadorned. This carried through into Basquiat's painting. Basquiat wasn't the first to use words in art – I think the cubists and people like Stuart Davis did that in the early 20th century. But he's possibly the most memorable practitioner of that form. When Andy Warhol showed words and labels it was cool (not warm). When Basquiat did it, it was hot. He merged pop with pure expressionism like no one else. The music of his art merged free jazz, jazz jazz, and punk. There was a lot of that happening musically in the 80s, and Basquiat was the best at putting it on canvas.

In his review of the Barbican show at the Guardian website, Jonathan Jones explains that if Basquiat employed pop forms, his purposes were deeper -- and heavier.

When Cy Twombley scrawled stuff like this in his abstract expressionist graffiti paintings, everyone accepted it as a serious comment on history. Basquiat and Twombly should be shown together, for Basquiat is a great modern history painter as well. His collisions of word and image, eloquence and cartoon fun, capture the broken and tragic arc of American history. Like the novelists Thomas Pynchon and William Burroughs, he turns to collage to convey the epic chaos of history. One, created when he was just 19, satirizes political cover-ups. Its establishment mouthpieces, spattered with blood-red paint, declare: “We have decided the bullet must have been going very fast.”

Basquiat digs not only into America’s bloody history but the gory roots of art itself. His painting Leonardo da Vinci’s Greatest Hits is a hilarious graffiti version of a page from Leonardo’s notebook. But it’s more than a joke. The drawings of muscles and legs are cleverly observed. Basquiat pored over his volume of Leonardo’s works – it is in the exhibition – and his art is full of just such anatomical sketches. That obsession with anatomy is at its most unforgettable in his grinning and chomping visions of human skulls. They are the skulls of the dead generations under the sidewalks of America.

Wherever he's at, I hope he is still pourin' it all out.