Before he became an icon, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a kid scrounging to get by in New York’s East Village. A traveling exhibition opening Friday at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis is a window into a singular moment—in New York, in America, and in the development of one of the planet’s most blazing artistic lights.
Basquiat Before Basquiat: East 12th Street, 1979-1980 is the artist’s entire output during a single, pre-fame year of his life, while he lived in a little apartment with his friend Alexis Adler. The exhibition includes paintings, sculpture, a notebook, and Adler’s intimate photographs of the artist living and working.
Stay up-to-date with the local arts scene
Subscribe to the weekly St. Louis Arts+Culture newsletter to discover must-attend art exhibits, performances, festivals, and more.
At the time featured in the show, Basquiat was rustling up his share of the $80 rent selling painted sweatshirts on the street. By the mid-80s, he was wealthy and famous, and by 1988 he died, at 27, of an overdose. Last spring, one of his skull paintings, Untitled (1982) sold for $110.5 million at Sotheby’s, making him the most expensive American artist ever sold at auction, according to artnews.com.
CAM’s executive director Lisa Melandri is organizing the show’s St. Louis iteration.
“This is one of those shows that helps you understand an artist’s evolution,” Melandri says. The images and items present a voracious learner and impossibly productive maker in his element.
“There was absolutely no distinction between living, breathing, eating, sleeping, and making art,” she says. “There was an absolutely division-less life where every moment was taken up with creativity.”
Adler’s portraits of the artist as an almost impossibly young man show a world where actual canvas was a luxury—so the refrigerator, the TV, the walls, the door, and Basquiat’s own face served as canvases. Poverty was no impediment to his hyperkinetic inventiveness.
The show presents a moment when young people depended on each other to find cultural happenings—instead of checking Facebook events, you’d check fliers wheat-pasted to telephone poles or ask the folks working at your favorite vintage store. Basquiat’s SAMO graffiti tag, ubiquitous in Manhattan in the late 1970s, was another piece of communication to kids in the know.
“Basquiat himself is such an extraordinary story—the idea of somebody who chose to dedicate their entire life to making something,” says Melandri, “someone who did this on the edges of normal society, if you will, certainly the edges of the art world.”
“It is beautiful, incisive, very much about current events, politics, social life—you name it, it’s salient,” she says. “It’s very rich. It speaks to every kind of intellectual endeavor and popular culture. The work is both a mirror and a cipher of its time. It’s taken hold of all our imagination.”
At CAM, Adler’s trove is displayed alongside later works, providing a sense of context and evolution for Basquiat’s practice. The later works are on loan from local collectors, which impresses Melandri.
“Wow, what a story about St. Louis—the prescience and the vision of our local collectors, that they had the vision to collect these works,” she says.
While many of Basquiat’s works included writing alongside the images, Melandri says the text works in the show surprised her.
“There is a huge number of basically what I would call text works that are language based,” Melandri says. “For me, that was a really revelatory part of his practice, particularly as a young artist. You look at him as a writer, as a poet, as somebody who is thinking about words as a true expressive kind of medium through which to share his artistic vision,” she says. “It’s a real surprise.”
The show opens Friday at CAM, with a member preview at 6 p.m. and public reception from 7–9 p.m. On Saturday at 11 a.m., “A Conversation on Jean-Michel Basquiat” brings together the show’s curator, Nora Burnett Abrams of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver; Alexis Adler; musician Felice Rosser; and critic and curator Carlo McCormick. The show runs through December 30.
