Jean-Michel Basquiat is part of the famous club of pop-rock culture stars who died at the fateful age of 27. Such as Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse or Kurt Cobain. Generally dead of overdose, like him in 1988, or by suicide during their wild, explosive and creative years in the heart of the maelstrom.
Fainting in the prime of life is giving yourself an image of eternal youth. Marilyn and James Dean live forever in the collective psyche through the splendor of their myths. So Basquiat, the magnificent and inflammable rebel, flower of the macadam of the zonard New York of the 1970s and 1980s. Is he really dead, by the way? To believe that he still looks at his hometown while crunching his post-covid wounds. We would have liked to see his portraits of Trump, laid in urgency by the political pamphleteer. Alas!
His profile and his art have inspired me for a long time. In Paris, I had run to see a fabulous retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010. Julian Schnabel had dedicated an excellent film to him in 1996. His career as a shooting star always bounces somewhere. He spoke Spanish, English and French, in a flurry of languages and influences. His figure of modernity, of Haitian descent on his father’s side, Puerto Rican on the maternal side, is anchored in a Brooklyn and a Manhattan that are both dangerous and electric. Basquiat will have long tagged under the name of SAMO, with Al Diaz, the damaged facades of buildings. His art is an urban cry, cicada stridulations, under crossed out words, hanging on to the train of life, in mixed improvisations, brutal and vital breaks, in sound waves.
A Haitian once told me he was sorry he hadn’t painted voodoo gods. But these arise from his graffiti, his drawings and his paintings. I thought I saw loas grimacing in his shaggy portraits, between three handwritten sentences, two faces screaming against racism and arrows pointing in all directions.
Here he is for a week at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the first retrospective of his bristling touch in the Quebec metropolis. Very important: a hundred works on a new theme.
The exhibition At full volume. Basquiat and music rightly explores the link that the artist had with a muse whose lyre he liked to break. He, whom his father had introduced to jazz, bebop and the classical repertoire, also fueled hip-hop and reggae. The man with 3,000 records only painted with melodies and rhythms in his ears, when he wasn’t plugged into the TV and his cartoons that make Smac! and scratch! Basquiat had been nourished by the Dadaists, the ” beat generation (he admired William S. Burroughs) and perhaps Baudelaire for his art of poetic correspondences where perfumes, colors and sounds respond to each other. Their amorous desires are hammered home, the hallucinations of drugs, the accents of synthesizers, zydeco and blues. Its rhythms are discordant and syncopated, like its malaise.
Some believe that there is a lack of music in this exhibition. But it seemed omnipresent to me, under various recordings, not very strong it is true to allow visitors to concentrate first on the works. The man who had founded, with other performance artists, the group Gray with invented sounds on improbable instruments, the fan of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, the opera and Bach lover is delivered to us in the marriage of rhythms, styles, canvases, drawings, notebooks, cubes and record covers. The vibrations came out of his brushes in sonic echoes. His portraits of black musicians resonate in the air. The videos of the exhibition deliver only a few words by Basquiat. Perhaps this shy man was not a great speaker. But his works are bombs.
It warms the heart to see so many young people from the black community showing up on Sherbrooke Street, attracted by its mirror, its beat and its fury. The exhibition is aimed at adults and teenagers. The latter must still find the contemporary era more “drabe” and less olé! ole! than his. It was more swinging when the young graffiti artist, painter, musician, stylist, DJ, poet, punk dandy and performer ignited the Big Apple during the dark nights of the Mudd Club.
In the canvases he painted in tandem with the stars Andy Warhol or Keith Haring, it was Basquiat’s signature that gave rhythm and meaning to the paintings. Over the years, his own comet flared up. She cries out for the freedom of a young black genius, whose art of irony forever defies ambient racism. Like a jazzman, in short.