My life in art: How Jean-Michel Basquiat taught me to forget about technique
12 February 2009
I've just taken delivery of an extraordinary work of art. It's a contemporary homage to John Everett Millais's famous Ophelia. I think mine is way better than Millais's original, which, although technically brilliant, is a tad formal for my taste. Which isn't that surprising. Millais was a senior member of the art establishment – a serious and important man. The artist who painted my version has never had a job, and has absolutely no truck with all that establishment glad-handing. He's far more interested in chocolate ice cream and bedtime stories.
My Ophelia was painted by my seven-year-old son. By any adult standards it is rubbish. To me, it is a work of brilliance. What I see in the painting is my son: the intensity of some of the brushstrokes, the literalness of the interpretation, and the occasional flamboyant touch. Nobody else in the world could have made this painting. It came from him. His art teacher despairs, but then again his art teacher is trying to teach him to paint and not to communicate.
Art is a language, albeit visual. It is all very well learning to draw like Leonardo or paint like Raphael, but if you can't communicate anything more than technical ability, then your work is dead. Art has to have something to say. And, for me, the greatest visual orator of them all was a young New Yorker called Jean-Michel Basquiat. An artist who, while still only in his early 20s, produced a painting called Notary (1983), which to my eyes is one of the finest pictures made in the late 20th century.
Basquiat was born in 1960 in Brooklyn, New York. Part Haitian, part Puerto Rican, he fitted effortlessly into 1970s multicultural New York. Although he was a bright child who showed early artistic promise, he chose to leave school before graduating. Not because he found the work particularly difficult, but the call of the city was just too alluring. Basquiat's early artistic efforts were as a graffiti poet. He signed his semi-surreal musings, which were dotted throughout downtown Manhattan, SAMO – an abbreviation of Same Old, or Same Old Shit. By the late 70s Basquiat had achieved some kind of cult status amongst the East Village hipsters.
Basquiat was indeed cool. He didn't try to be: he just was. He had interests ranging from hip-hop, jazz, baseball and boxing through to French poetry, the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci and highbrow modernist art. It was the appreciation of the latter, and most likely his encounter with the art of American abstract expressionist painter Cy Twombly that gave Basquiat the confidence to go from graffiti to fine art.
By the early 80s Basquiat was gaining a significant reputation for his paintings. Not only were they highly individualistic – a mixture of words, crudely drawn cartoonish figures and daubs of coloured paint – they were paintings. That was pretty radical. At the time art had disappeared down an intellectual cul-de-sac, where abstract, minimalist sculptures, devoid of any discernable humanity, were very much the order of the day. Basquiat's art wasn't so much a new chapter; it was a whole new book.
And there's no better example of this than his stupendously elaborate Notary. His canvas isn't stretched across a frame, but stuck to three huge wood panels that might well have been sourced from a local skip. It is Basquiat's idea of a triptych: three interrelating stories spread across 13 demented, colourful feet. The effect is part cave painting, part graffiti, part improv jazz. It is a masterpiece. Basquiat didn't have any formal training, but he knew what he was doing. In Notary you can detect the influence of such modern masters as Miro, de Kooning and Rauchenberg. But far, far more importantly, you can see Basquiat.
Notary is totally raw. He makes no attempt to paint "properly", knowing that if he did, the demonstration of technique – something learned and therefore copied - would create a barrier to the pure communication of his thoughts and feelings. And yet there is so much to admire from a technical point of view. The way Basquiat controls colour demonstrates a virtuosity that stands comparison with the best. His use of African motifs relates not only to his own genealogy, but also to the works of Matisse and Picasso. And the text he throws onto the canvas, words like "salt" and "dehydrate", done in rough block capitals, seem knowingly cryptic.
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| Jean-Michel Basquiat |
In 1996 the artist Julian Schnabel made a movie biopic about Basquiat. It's a brilliant film, telling the story of how the artist achieved great fame in his early 20s, becoming friends with everybody from Madonna to Andy Warhol. It shows, too, the downside of living at the heart of the mid-80s Manhattan counter-culture, where heroin was often the plat du jour – and how, at the age of only 27, Basquiat was dead from a heroin overdose.
It was Schnabel's movie that gave me my first proper introduction to Basquiat. I had heard of him, but I was too ready to listen to friends and colleagues who dismissed him as "not a proper artist". By which they meant he wasn't following in the modernist tradition of the almost complete removal of the artist's personality from the artwork in the manner of say, Donald Judd or Richard Serra. But Basquiat understood the context in which he was operating. His was on a mission to breath life back into art: to save it from itself. Like the impressionists of the late 19th century, he wanted to paint expressively to counter the sterility and formal rigour of the existing art establishment.
The impressionists made real life their central subject. Basquiat made his life the central subject. My seven-year old son made his subject copying a classic painting. All shared the same ambition: the desire not to show off how skilful they might be, but to take their chance to communicate what it felt like to be them at that moment. The result – naive, loose, informal pictures – have something vital to say.
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