Jean-Michel Basquiat

[undergroundrailroad]

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Stylish renegade

BY ARIELLA BUDICK
STAFF WRITER

March 27, 2005

Like the twentysomething titan that he was, Jean-Michel Basquiat wore hand-tailored Armani suits to work. By the end of a day in his studio, the outfits were splattered with paint, a combination of pinstripes and colored streaks that became his sartorial signature. Those ravaged suits were a symbol of his status as a bohemian master of the universe.

For the half-dozen years of his dazzling career, Basquiat had it both ways and more: He was the renegade insider, the sophisticated primitive, the street artist who embodied the 1980s' intoxication with sudden and conspicuous wealth.

The Brooklyn Museum of Art has devoted two floors to Basquiat's truncated career, and the works, big as they are, barely stretch to fill the space. He had two years of spectacular, if piebald, productivity, but even before he died of a heroin overdose in 1988 at the age of 27, Basquiat's intensity was on the wane. The first half of the show chronicles the exhilarating birth and exploitation of a fiery talent; the second half tracks its depressing and equally precipitous decline.

Middle-class Brooklyn

Born in Brooklyn to parents of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent, Basquiat belonged solidly to the middle class. But he relished the role of outsider, dropping out of high school, scrawling graffiti on derelict Lower East Side walls, training himself in fits and starts to make art. As a teenager, he signed cryptic aphorisms with the tag SAMO (as in "same old ..."). But in 1981, at 20, he discovered a brand of graffiti-influenced expressionism that launched both his name and his destiny.

[Swamp Rat]

1. I hope the show travels to New Orleans someday.

:)