Jean-Michel Basquiat: life, art, and cultural impact

Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat

One of the most famous stars of the East Village graffiti scene and Neo-Expressionist movement of the 1980s, Jean-Michel Basquiat once famously remarked of his paintings, "Every single line means something." If this is true, then this sets an unprecedented task for the interpreter, who is faced with the daunting task of unraveling a web of entanglements in paintings such as the two untitled paintings from 1981 that I propose to examine in the course of this essay. It is more likely, however, that the "meaning" Basquiat claimed to burden each of his lines with is something more ephemeral, and thus difficult to enunciate in language. This is why Basquiat's chosen medium was a visual one - although it must be said that Basquiat's paintings contain both musical and textual elements. So thick with obscure references are many of his paintings that critics have been debating their significance ever since the artist's death at the young age of 27.

I have chosen two paintings to examine from the "early" part of Basquiat's career. I feel that this phase of Basquiat provides an apt summation of what would turn out to be primary preoccupations of the artist throughout the course of his short career. It also avoids dipping into what some critics, such as Robert Hughes, consider to be some of his major pitfalls, namely drug addiction and a need to constantly "crank out" new paintings as a result of his fame and popularity in the art market.

The first painting is a sort of abstract landscape split vertically down the center by a thin red line. Unlike Basquiat's later work, which is more difficult to make out, this early painting consists of crudely rendered vehicles and objects - airplanes, cars, a hammer, and a cannon. All of these objects are composed with thin, skeletal lines - mere outlines or "stick figures" of what the objects are meant to be. As all of these objects appear to be floating in the space of the white canvas and are not visibly connected in any way, this gives the painting a feeling of childlike naivete. Yet the painting resists falling into anarchic chaos via a clever deployment of line by the artist. There is the aforementioned red line splitting the canvas in two. On the right side of the canvas, a black line appears horizontally, before sharply turning vertically to the right. Near the top of the canvas, it shifts again at a ninety-degree angle, before going back down again. This line is vital in the composition of the painting, as it serves an easy access point by which the eye may navigate the plane of the painting, thus establishing a feeling of movement that would otherwise feel absent, as the rigid red line in the center of the canvas seems to be frozen. In between the squarish enclosure the black line forms, there are two airplanes - nearly identical in shape, but while the bottom one is transparent, the one on top is angrily filled in with a sludge of black and white paint, forming a sort of dirty gray tint. A rhythm is established in the painting by the repetition of certain elements throughout - namely the letter a, a series of circles, and a collection of crudely drawn nails.

In formal terms, the rhythm established by the movement of line and objects is the most persuasive aspect of the entire painting. At the same time, despite the rhythmic intensity one finds in this painting, it does not succeed in conveying any particular mood or idea. The painting is essentially a rendering of mundane, disparate objects caught up in a fragmented narrative that is impossible to piece together. Basquiat seems content to merely hint at his forms by outlining them in thick black lines as a child might, instead of evoking them through a subtler means of rendering their likeness on the canvas. It seems as though the objects are secondary to the overall composition itself. Yet the composition, despite its inherent rhythmicality, does not cohere on any intellectual or emotional plane. We are left with the impression that these are the mere doodlings of a bored, disinterested child. The feeling of incompleteness lingers the longer one contemplates the canvas, until one walks away fairly certain that this is, in fact, an unfinished work of art - no matter whether or not each line really does "mean something," as Basquiat so vaguely put it.

A more successful effort can be seen in the other untitled painting from 1981, this one an ecstatically colorful portrait of a solitary male figure. While the drawing in this picture is also crude and childlike, it nonetheless manages to evoke a sense of the totemic and eternal - qualities that seem to be lacking in the previous painting. Here, the lines really do "mean something," as the entire composition is contingent on the interplay of wavering lines, which establish a rhythm that manages to come off as both intense and playful. The figure's skull like face stares out at us from the center of the painting, smiling at us with teeth that are formed from five slashes of white paint. The figure's head is adorned with a black crown, which may be interpreted as a halo or a crown of thorns - it is difficult to tell which Basquiat meant to infer. Most likely, its ambiguity is there for a reason - perhaps the artist wished us to perceive the black circle adorned with black lines as being both halo and crown of thorns. The figure's torso is tremendously undersized, comprised of a maze of squiggly lines, when compared to the length and strength of the figure's legs, which are rendered in a startling blood red. In terms of color, it is the figure's legs that have the most striking effect on the viewer; this is ultimately where our first glance is directed. Between the figure's legs, a blinding smudge of white paint. Moving up from the legs, beyond the elephantine genitals, rendered in red-orange paint, past the aforementioned torso, the figure's arms are raised in a position that simultaneously evokes a disinterested shrug and ecstasy.

The success of the painting resides in its emotional ambiguity. Stylistically, the painting perfectly captures those essence of Basquiat's work that one critic has described as both childlike and menacing.

The figure in the painting, with his sharp, jagged, mysterious crown, emerges as a sort of sun god. With arms outstretched against the frenzied colors and lines that create the anarchic backdrop of the portrait, the figure's death-like mask gazes out at us in a manner that is both startling and vague. He seems to be caught between the realms of culture and nature, yet does not really belong to either. A powerful feeling of ecstatic joy, sorrow, and disenfranchisement seems to emanate from the chaos of this canvas.

This sense of disjunction that one finds in the latter canvas characterizes Basquiat's best art, I believe. Where as the marks and lines and splotches of color that comprise the first painting do not ultimately cohere into a compelling composition, in the second work one is thoroughly overwhelmed by the emotional and intellectual ambiguity that comes across through the image. The second painting uses disparate visual elements - in the background, one can make out letters and words, Twombly-esque scrawlings of bizarre animals - in order to evoke a raw visual syncopation that is as pleasing for the eye as it is stimulating to the mind.

Basquiat's work is often viewed as a hybrid of graffiti street art and abstract expressionism. As one writer has commented, Basquiat's work is the product of "intensely felt, but fragmented experience and knowledge." believe that when fragmentation is done well, as it is in the second canvas discussed here, it has the power of opening up doors to the collective unconscious. It thus presents a puzzle to be deciphered by the inquiring mind, convincing us that there is a lot of truth to Basquiat's quoted statement that every line has meaning in his paintings. While this is less apparent in the first painting, Basquiat's work is far from being casual or graffiti-like. In the second painting, it becomes readily apparent that the composition has been heavily re-worked. It is a painting that is as semantically complex as it is frighteningly visceral in its deceptively primitive styling.

What one finds, when examining both the paintings discussed here, is that they are emblematic of one of the main themes running throughout Basquiat's oeuvre - man's conflict between nature and culture. In the first painting, the human figure is conspicuously absent. But a number of tools and vehicles that man's development has relied upon over the years - from the hammer to the airplane - form the nexus of the painting. In this regard, the absence of a human figure is haunting. It infers that the tools that we have invented in the name of progress very well may outlast us in our ongoing struggle to master the natural world.