Tamra Davis’ new documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child opens with grainy, previously unseen footage of the 25-year-old Basquiat at the height of his career. Just two years later, in 1988, the mercurial artist would die of a heroin overdose. Here, though, a dreadlocked Basquiat appears bright-faced, at ease. “This is a high-quality film, right?” he deadpans. It’s VHS. They laugh.
Then the bebop drops. Frenetic, occasionally amelodic, virtuosic: it’s a musical metaphor for the Radiant Child, who rose from poverty to defy the Minimalist conventions of the art world with dense, energetic paintings and drawings. Cue the montage.
Davis traces the arcs of Basquiat’s career and life through the words of friends, ex-lovers and colleagues. He was a serial runaway, a trilingual 17-year-old cartoonist pedaling handmade postcards in Taxi Driver-era New York City. Next he became the graffitist SAMO©, the subversive subconscious of the Lower East Side. Bright, ambitious and well-liked, Basquiat and his language-oriented tags quickly drew the attention of downtown tastemakers, who encouraged him to try his hand at serious painting. Soon SAMO was dead and Jean-Michel Basquiat was an international hit, with sold-out shows in Los Angeles following sold-out shows in New York.
Soon Basquiat was “hobnobbing with the hobnobs,” as Andy Warhol put it. The two men, separated generationally, nevertheless became fast friends. For Basquiat, Warhol represented legitimacy. To Warhol, Basquiat was youth and new-cool. They collaborated on a series of paintings shortly before Warhol’s death in 1987—though by then, a backlash at Basquiat’s abrasive public persona and drug abuse had tarnished his star somewhat.
Still, it was his eclectic style that made him famous from the start. Basquiat was gifted at channeling urban energies through a sieve of high art, in a way that seemed accessible and relevant. Ubiquitous in his work are words: scrawled in the hand of a child or crossed out, his lexicon—terms such as “Skin Head Wigs,” “Secret Society,” “Oil,” and “Tar”—feels pictorial, like something sublingual. He worked from “source material”—piles of opened books, music blaring, TV on, acquaintances visiting. “Influence is not influence,” he once said. “It’s simply someone’s idea going through my new mind.”
Friends say Basquiat became increasingly despondent at the experience of black America in the ’80s, a topic hard to separate from his art. In his elite circle, he was a figure of renown, but on the street in New York he was “just another bummy-looking black kid,” living under the thumb of what he saw as “institutionalized forms of whiteness and corrupt white regimes of power.”
Basquiat was also frustrated by art world cognoscenti who refused to place his work on par with contemporary artists like Julian Schnabel and David Salle. Beginning in 1982, he came to rely more and more on drugs. After Warhol’s death the bottom seemed to fall out. Despite a brief attempt at sobriety, Basquiat was found dead in his SoHo studio on August 12, 1988, which prompts Davis to quote Langston Hughes’ “Genius Child” with the lines “Kill him, and let his soul run wild.”
In his 1981 piece on Basquiat for Artforum, from which the title of Davis’ documentary is drawn, poet and critic Rene Ricard writes “We are no longer collecting art. We are buying individuals. This is no piece by SAMO. This is a piece of SAMO.” If so, Basquiat never really left. He survives in over 2,000 paintings and drawings that testify that he was both of his time and far ahead of it.
Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child opens Friday, October 15 at the Winifred Moore Auditorium as part of the Webster Film Series, and runs through Sunday, October 17. Showtimes at 7:30 each night. For more information go to webster.edu/filmseries.
