Pay for Soup/Build a Fort/ Set that on Fire

Jean-Michel Basquiat is the only black American painter to have made a substantial mark on the history of art. He is amongst the most influential artists of an international movement started around 1980 which was marked by the post-modern return to figurative painting. He died at age 27. Basquiat is art's answer to Jimi Hendrix and Charlie Parker. Although his work might look unsophisticated at first, it is evidence of a powerful poetical and visual gift. Basquiat was getting an international echo with his work before most of the artists his age had time to finish art school.

Luckily, Basquiat has left us a trenchant summary of his early life in Untitled (Biography), 1983.

JEAN MICHEL BASQUIAT BORN DEC. 22/1960/BROOKLYN/NY

MOTHER: PUERTO RICAN (FIRST GENERATION) FATHER: PORT AU PRINCE, HAITI (DIVORCED) -

[NAME OF TOWNI

ST. ANNS ? P.S. 1O198 P.S.45 (SOME CATHOLIC SCHOOL DURING TEAR + 1/2 IN PUERTO RICO -) I.S.293 CITY AS SCHOOL 11th GRADE DROPOUT PUT A BOX OF SHAVING CREAM IN PRINCIPAL'S FACE AT GRADUATION NO POINT IN GOING BACK

FIRST AMBITION: FIREMAN FIRST ARTISTIC AMBITION: CARTOONIST

EARLY THEMES WERE: 1. THE SEAVIEW FROM VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA 2. ALFRED E. NEUMAN 3. ALFRED HICTHCOCK (HIS FACE OVER + OVER) 4. NIXON 5. CARS (MOSTLY DRAGSTERS) 1

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6. WARS 7. WEAPONS 8. MADE DRAWINGS OF OOPICK+FRITZ+WAIR+YABOO WITH MARC PROZZO

A. SENT DRAWING OF A GUN TO J.EDGAR HOOVER IN THIRD GRADE (NO REPLY)

TAUGHT SECOND GRADERS WHEN I WAS IN THE FOURTH GRADE (CARS MADE OF PAPER CLIPS MASKING TAPE + FASTENERS)

SCHOOLING: SOME ACADEMIC LIFE DRAWINGS IN NINTH GRADE (WAS THE ONLY CHILD THAT FAILED)

EARLY MUSIC INFLUENCES: WEST SIDE STORY THE "WATUSI" ROUND `BOUT MIDNIGHT WALKING HAPRY BLACK ORPHEUS

As far as it is possible to verify, the information in this Biography is correct. Basquiat shows his great sense of humour with the idea of a sea view from the bottom of the sea. Some of his early poems are equally witty and even have punch lines.

PUBLIC FIGURE HIM FIGUREHEAD

THE PENCILCLUB AMASSED A GREAT FORTUNE TO SHOOT A MAN THRU A CANON HE WAVED BACK

CAN YOU SHOW THE NUMBER OF SHARES OF STOCK OR IS IT 200 SHARES OF STOCK NO PAR VALUE.

HAVE YOU ANY BOOKS OR RECORDS HERE TO LOOK AT THAT WOULD REFRESH YOUR RECOLLECTION - DO YOU OWN OR HOLD STOCK IN ANY BUSINESS, CORPORATION, COMPANY OR INDIVIDUAL CONCERN - 2

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JUST ANSWER YES OR NO

I WILL RAISE MY VOICE I WILL STAND UP AND LOOK YOU IN THE EYE AND I WILL DO THE SAME YOU CAN TELL ME GO TO HELL - AND I WELL TELL YOU THIS EXAMINATION IS OVER -

Basquiat's comment in the Biography that he was the only child to fail an academic drawing class and his letter to J. Edgar Hoover (no reply) highlight his need to see his failures as funny inversions of reality. The humour insulates him from any sting they might contain. There is also an obvious craving for attention or recognition, sometimes positive, but sometimes negative, for example when he uses the slapstick of putting shaving foam on the principle's head on graduation day. At an alternative high school in Brooklyn Basquiat met Al Diaz. The two created SAMO, a catchy name for an umbrella identity under which they pursued various collaborative artistic projects together. Alongside the SAMO project Basquiat also played in a band and made disposable art: T-shirts and postcards. Although they are not without artistic merit and have a certain dada charm, Basquiat probably knew that he had not yet translated his talents into a coherent perspective. At night he would go to a certain number of hip downtown night clubs. By intuition or through what people were telling him in these clubs, where he was becoming a noticeable feature, he worked out who, what and where was important in terms of the visual arts.

Basquiat launched his offensive on the contemporary art establishment by spray painting poems or sentences prominently on walls close to venues where things were happening. This was the time of his most natural position, and one in which he would enjoy great leverage: that of an attacking outsider. The sprayed sentences, signed SAMO, have Basquiat's final formulation and his signature spray paint writing, which is capitalised, very regular and omits the vertical line in the E's. They are simple, cool, detached and sophisticated. Some of these phrases or poems have survived on paper. One of his phrases reads:

PAY FOR SOUP/BUILD A FORT/SET THAT ON FIRE

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This is a game plan. First, get in position. Then create an artistic vision and style you can live in, then set it on fire, thereby destroying it, or maybe yourself. Pay for soup could be the years ‘78-'80, build a fort ‘81-'86, and set that on fire `87-'88. The Biography mentions that Basquiat's earliest ambition was to become a fireman. Maybe not to put out fires, but, like in Fahrenheit 451, to start them. why fire? Because...

FIRE WILL ATTRACT MORE ATTENTION THAN ANY OTHER CRY FOR HELP

Basquiat enjoyed attacking the art world from the outside. As success and acceptance came, however, it would recast him in an inside role, and critics of his work often said that the raw street energy would be sapped by a more comfortable life style made possible by money and fame. For Basquiat to remain an outsider and avoid becoming comfortable or satisfied transgressions of artistic and behavioural norms would have to proceed at the same rate as the recognition of his work would draw him into the inside. This was possible for a time, as the Fun Gallery show in 1982 demonstrated. A group of paintings done around 1985 featuring unusual supports and particularly raw imagery and execution, to which Link Parabole, 1985 (p.104) belongs, is another example. However, with his huge talents it would only be a matter of time, and in the eighties probably a short time, before the wave of recognition caught him from behind and drowned him in the mainstream.

Another problem with outside mess, highlighted by Rimbaud, is that outsiders are not truly outside the system. It is simply a role that society allows some artists to play. They are more turning cogs in the machine. This is not only a theoretical insight, but also a historical one. The avant-garde has, since its inception, been continually sucked up into mainstream consciousness as time passes. Artaud thought he had found a defence to this in the art of the insane and of those too young to be within the system, but his ideas were picked up in the recognition of what Dubuffet has termed art brut. It therefore seems that there is an intellectual connection between Basquiat and art brut, and also, to some extent, an aesthetic and stylistic one.

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Some of Basquiat's early poems have an aesthetic sensibility. They are content wrought effortlessly into form. A steady undercurrent of socio- artistic criticism pervades them, which can also be seen in Basquiat's art.

THE GREAT UNWASHED GOTHIC PAINTING EYES IN ANGRY TO BE ANSWERED RAPTURE RECORDED PROOF EFFORTLESS SLAPPING SENSE IN TERMS OF TICKING SUITCASES DENIES EVER SEEING STERILE DIVIDER MOST PRESSING MOSS RETREAT -

THE WHOLE LIVERY LINE BOW LIRE THIS WITH THE BIGMONEY ALL STUFFED INTO THESE FEET BLEACHED ASSASIN CURATES MILAGE OVER A DISTANCE EAVESDROPPING MORE OFTEN DISCRIMINATING THE LOW BROW MIGHT BE THE DOCTOR'S BROTHER AND THIS OTHER MAN LITTLE NAZI TEA SETS WITH EAGLES ON THEM BRONZE THIS HIGH BRICE INLAY

Gothic painting comes to mind when Basquiat uses gold paint and paints halos and crowns over figures, and more substantially when he tries to imbue the figures in his work with magical qualities in an art that will work if the viewer can transcend the magic's physical representation.

Livery line, big money, bleached assassin curates, are words with a hard racial edge. Rather than trying to overcome what he might have considered a handicap Basquiat turned being black to his advantage. Despite a keen sense of unfairness about a perceptible racist undercurrent in American society as a whole, he was not an activist or militant. The use of some imagery, specifically black or African, leaves no trace that would allow an uninformed viewer to suppose the painter was black. Being so was simply an important part of his daily life. Police harassment of and brutality against blacks was something which 5

Extract from Basquiat – Museo Revoltella Downloaded from www.marenzi.com All text © Luca Marenzi 2003 Pay for Soup/Build a Fort/ Set that on Fire touched him to the core because it could always have been him. It was specifically what being black meant to him as an unalterable part of who and what he was, as part of his identity, that the subject most interested him. By resolutely playing on his blackness Basquiat could strengthen his position as an outsider. In the white art world it would mark him out as different and as someone who breaks the rules.

It may be that Basquiat was lucky that at the same time he was spraying poems downtown there was a growing interest in the spray painters of the subways. Nevertheless it is clear that Basquiat never had a particular interest in making art with spray paint, although he did use it in some early paintings. The SAMO slogans got noticed and would allow Basquiat to start making and marketing drawings and paintings, often on found objects, which we would now describe as his mature work starting around the end of 1980.

Basquiat was intelligent, inquisitive and full of a desire to live life. From an early age he enjoyed breaking rules, maybe to achieve freedom from them, maybe because of the hedonistic thrill of the moment and of trying to get away with it, but probably in an earnest attempt to find out who he really was. A psychological theory postulates that an individual will have no better insights into his own preferences and motivations than someone else who knows the relevant behavioural history of that individual. Basquiat certainly made his own decisions. His quitting school a year before his graduation, his living in the streets and his staccato amorous relationships, his drug taking, his live-by-night-sleep-by-day rhythm are all signs of that. It was also symptomatic of a generation where the one-time question "where are you from?" lost its meaning because it did not help in any way define who or what people were, how they would react to things or what they would do. Basquiat may have been trying to escape the dictates of the identikit of readily available and acceptable choices and beliefs that made people around him appear to be limited psychological pastiches.

Playing the savage might have degenerated into a puerile game if it had not allowed him to do something quite extraordinary: to jettison his education and upbringing. Choosing a painting style of child-like simplicity and resemblance he could, in his paintings at least, 6

Extract from Basquiat – Museo Revoltella Downloaded from www.marenzi.com All text © Luca Marenzi 2003 Pay for Soup/Build a Fort/ Set that on Fire effectively negate years of his past. Great artists often get out of their own way by unlearning everything they have learnt. Great actors, for example, can immerse themselves completely in the playing of a role yet simultaneously remain entirely themselves. The total removal of any sign of skill can sometimes allow a higher degree of profundity to be achieved than through technical perfection. Basquiat's cartoon drawings at school were skillful to the point of becoming brilliant feats, testimonies of hard work. By taking three steps back he could reach the state of "Rapture recorded, proof effortless", a precise description of a great Basquiat drawing or painting.

Basquiat's need for constant companionship, recognition, fame and notoriety made him an extrovert, but at the same time he was shy to the point of insecurity and introversion. He was also extremely sensitive. Maybe too sensitive. It has been said that "He was too externalised; he didn't have a strong enough internal life."

In his paintings Basquiat moved away from the linear logic of the adult to the immediate logic of the child. His field of vision expanded to 180 degrees in which perspective disappears in favour of a reassuringly immediate and surrounding flatness. Although there is nothing inside the painting there is often a lot behind it, like an alternative narrative. The perspective that we constantly strive to put ourselves into, and are used to, could be compared to reading a mathematical equation from the side, all the symbols neatly lined up together with their necessary connectors. Basquiat shows us the equation from a different angle, from the front, showing only one symbol and leaving the viewer unsure about its connection to what is hinted at behind. Perhaps it was this aspect of his work that made it important for him to work over many of his paintings again and again, adding layer upon layer, incorporating the actions and ideas behind a painting into its physical reality. A good example of multi-layered meanings is

MILK©

"The political implications are intense with a comic nightmare of greed: the patent on milk! This is about as refined as poetry gets, and it takes us right back to Africa where the Masai in fact do own all cattle and sic sequitur, milk. I'm pretty sure though that the immediate trigger for 7

Extract from Basquiat – Museo Revoltella Downloaded from www.marenzi.com All text © Luca Marenzi 2003 Pay for Soup/Build a Fort/ Set that on Fire this work can be found in a popular club hit of the early part of 1981, "Tell Me That I'm Dreaming, written by Don Was. A favourite of Jean's it contains the line: "Man needs milk so he owns a million cows.

Of the many marks that Basquiat used, the copyright symbol is one of the most often repeated and most trenchant. Already in the sprayed poems it had played its role. Although it is illegal to spray walls, because it is a violation of the rights of the owner, the copyright can still somehow apply to the text-the law can still protect the artist's higher form of ownership. This is what Basquiat must have been looking for. Knowing that it was hard to be cool with a lot of money, and probably having seen in his early family life that material ownership of things was in any case flimsy compared to the emotional and intellectual ownership of thoughts and communications, the copyright symbol provided him with a critical bridge between the two worlds. Basquiat needed money because it would allow him to buy and do things he would otherwise not have been able to. It also provided a convenient score-board with which recognition could be measured. The actual money, however, would always be spent as quickly as it could be made.

Trade Mark, a phrase and symbol (TM) which Basquiat also used, is a much less popular choice, probably because it is transparently commercial, deals with ownership of descriptions and names rather than intellectual property and in any case simply does not pack the same punch as its shorter and rounder cousin.

Basquiat suffered self-alienation. We are left with the impression of a uniquely gifted child prodigy, with the aura of a far greater spirit shackled in the flesh. All those black men with halos and crowns hovering over them in the paintings are accounts of Basquiat's state of mind. His belief in a supervening mission helped overcome what must have been a sense of emptiness of some kind inside. He filled the emptiness with factual information but also through the creation of a different world in which to live in, his paintings. They are his fort.

Recognition also helped fill the void, delivering one brief high after the other. One of the reasons he craved fame was that it provided him with momentary reaffirmations of his existence and identity. As he 8

Extract from Basquiat – Museo Revoltella Downloaded from www.marenzi.com All text © Luca Marenzi 2003 Pay for Soup/Build a Fort/ Set that on Fire created his own world and his own place in it, however, he steadily removed himself from our world. The recognition and money flowing in added a further incentive to move ever further out. Drugs could deliver the same effect, or at least deaden his hypersensitivity.

Viewed in their entirety Basquiat's paintings propose an alternative (aesthetic) value system. There are repeated references to the streets, to African art, but also to Egypt and petroglyphs. Symbols and mechanisms of exchange value, such as $1,000,000, PESO NETO or ESTIMATED VALUE appear everywhere. It is unclear whether Basquiat actually did possess a coherent alternative value system or used his paintings, and his life, to suggest one. It would be impossible to extrapolate the entire system from the paintings today, but the possibility of its suggestion is tantalising enough to generate excitement and capture our imagination. The system hinted at does not introduce new subjects, but simply reappraises them, puts them into a different perspective, which is in keeping with Basquiat as an analyst and critic.

It is difficult to imagine Basquiat making his paintings from the immediate surroundings that he would have found anywhere outside a large metropolis such as New York or Los Angeles, where things were constantly happening. The paintings and drawings made during the short trips to Modena, St. Moritz or Appenzell are unaffected and even have particular quality, but it is hard to image that he could have stayed in such places, including his hide-away in Maui, for long without losing touch with much of what he used as inputs for his paintings.

The continued copying from an outside source, the transcribing of words deadens our usual perceptive apparatus, like the repetition of a mantra. The mind wanders. This effect is generated by Basquiat when a word is repeated several times. Through repetition the original meaning is lost, no longer remains a consideration. The same is probably true of the striking through of some words. Their shape can be used but their usual meaning is negated. The ceaseless repetition of images, especially in the drawings, must have led the artist and vicariously the viewer to a state in which the total acceptance of meaning led to a loss of meaning, or rather made space for a deeper, more spiritual state. Just as in some of the other new art forms of the 9

Extract from Basquiat – Museo Revoltella Downloaded from www.marenzi.com All text © Luca Marenzi 2003 Pay for Soup/Build a Fort/ Set that on Fire eighties, such as rap, hip-hop, electric boogie, graffiti and dancing there is a threshold of alienation to reach, so the viewer of Basquiat's paintings has to accept “eye rap” to fully appreciate them.

Like the rhythmlessness of free jazz and the use of samples which repeat chance phrases until a musical quality can be discerned in them, Basquiat takes basic figures, words and fragments and fuses them together in compositions that work visually. The ability to assimilate things, even from the past, and reuse them in a contemporary setting was one of the talents of Charlie Parker, for which Basquiat probably felt a debt of gratitude. In the paintings Basquiat not only uses the names of Parker and other jazz idols, but adopts their ability to improvise. In literature a similar influence could be attributed to the beat poets and Kerouac and Burroughs, although they do not feature as names in the paintings or drawings. They are nevertheless closer to legitimising, if that word can be used, Basquiat's art and life style. "Jean's output was tremendous and never satisfied the demand. During his first gallery season, pictures would be purchased after the first hit with paint, even though his method was to rework with several layers of paint. The rather extraordinary ladies, and occasional men, whom his dealer brought to the studio would leave with as many unfinished canvases as they and their drivers could carry. His dealer's advice to clients - the object I suppose was to locate the best investment seems to have led Jean-Michel to large canvases of big heads with no words. He produced an amazing amount and left them, barely worked up, leaning on the walls, so the carriage trade could just pick them up and leave without bothering him while he worked on small drawings that he could Xerox and apply to doors before painting them and adding them to the final, carefully chosen phrases. The words bothered the collectors. They somehow equated the work with graffiti, which was carefully obsoleted to a fad by the status quo. Also, the words tended more and more frequentlv to raise unpleasant issues. Jean's drawings followed suit. At this time, winter- spring 1952, his best work was small, a factor ignored by a market based on size pricing, and a serious drawback during an accelerated increase in the general size of the pictures that were being fabricated in other studios. It was survival of the biggest. Tiny paintings would come back in the following year, however, but the damage had been 10

Extract from Basquiat – Museo Revoltella Downloaded from www.marenzi.com All text © Luca Marenzi 2003 Pay for Soup/Build a Fort/ Set that on Fire done and a seemingly endless array of unfinished Basquiats will forever circulate in the tertiarv market. Oddly, they are still preferred and are priced only a little below the forgeries. Jean would devise a method for producing handsome big paintings later, when he collaborated with Andy Warhol.”

Some of Basquiat's best paintings look unfinished, although they are completely finished, for example Dextrose, 1982 , which once belonged to Andy Warhol. The gold colour, so dominant, would have meant something to Warhol because of his own early paintings on silver or gold backgrounds. The abstract interface between the black and gold would have been of interest to him because in the eighties he was experimenting with ways of making his own forms of abstract art. The crown and DEXTROSE, a simple sugar as well as the protruding corners of the stretcher, mark the painting out effectively as the work of Basquiat.

The forgeries Ricard mentions above are easy to spot and have since been removed from circulation, but the “carriage trade” heads remain and there were a number of paintings and drawings left in the studio at the time of Basquiat's death. In both eases it is hard to say which are finished and which begun. The drawings are particularly difficult, since in the period `85-'88 some of the finished drawings and even paintings such as Eroica I and II, 1985, have detail of almost manic compulsion. Others have a simple head or mask and appear hardly started.

Because of a general unfinished quality in all of Basquiat's work, even the truly unfinished paintings and drawings have an appeal and fascination which makes them important works of art, like the late paintings of Cezanne or Monet.

Following is a list of comments on selected paintings and drawings in this book which will put the information above into a more concrete context. Untitled, 1981, was in the P.S.1 exhibition in 1981. It shows the outline of town architecture or maybe a street map under the spray paint, while in the distance we can make out the twin towers of the World Trade Center - a view that Basquiat would have been

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Extract from Basquiat – Museo Revoltella Downloaded from www.marenzi.com All text © Luca Marenzi 2003 Pay for Soup/Build a Fort/ Set that on Fire familiar with from living in Brooklyn. The whole composition, which includes letters which cannot be put together into words, is extremely spontaneous but simplistic and primitive in style. Untitled, 1981 was also shown at P.S.1. Unusually, the head shown is not black. The recurring letter A may be a reference to Alexis Adler, a girlfriend with whom Basquiat lived around this time.

Untitled (Head), 1981, shows outlines of an architectural compound, possibly a prison. At top right there is barbed wire. At left the letter S appears in a house. The S might mean that it is a SAMO house, but it has also been interpreted to mean salt, as is the case in the drawing Salt, 1981, or as a reference to Superman. In the centre there is the face of a black man, probably a self-portrait.

Loans, 1981, and Untitled, 1981, go together because they both have the three balls that signify the pawn shop. In the life of the street stolen property could be taken to the pawn shop to get cash. In this scenario the black man with the jail stripes has been caught by the police. A smudged halo hovers over him, nevertheless conferring sainthood on him. The star of the policeman on the left confers an identity. Faintly, on the right, we see a star with the letters NOTA in red. With the help of The Dutch Settlers (Panel 1), 1982, they can be interpreted as starting the phrase NOTARY PUBLIC, and the star as a seal. A speculation could be made connecting the power of words with rules and enforcement systems. Some acts require a set legal form, for example must be "under seal" or can be executed only in the presence of witnesses or notaries. If the correct procedures are followed the words have effect, otherwise they won't work. This transition from declarative to constitutive is referred to by some legal theorists quite literally as magic. Perhaps it was this transforming of simple words to words with the power to change the world that interested Basquiat.

"Cadillac Moon, 1981, depicting a stack of TV sets and a ear body with chassis removed, is signed SAMO© but the tag has been crossed out- one of the first examples of Basquiat's proclivity for cancelling out words. In place of SAMO, Basquiat has written AARON, a name that appears frequently in works of this period and refers to Hank Aaron, one of Basquiat's heroes and a top member of his pantheon of 12

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"Famous Negro Athletes." Aaron represents an early instance of Basquiat's frequent focus on black subjects, specifically athletes and musicians.

3 Species, 1982, is a raw painting which is done on a support where the canvas is freely floating out over the edges, a typical support done in this year. This kind of support was made mainly by Steve Thornton, who was Basquiat's assistant at the time. Many variations on the self- made stretcher/canvas theme were made in other paintings around this time. City animals inhabit the wild surface: a pigeon (grey) flies past a rat or mouse while at lower left there is a more unlikely city dweller. On a drawing, subsequently stuck on the canvas, a human face appears with the body of a prehistoric chicken.

Saint, 1982, has frequent references to a bird shape that is reminiscent of rupestrean symbols. The paint has been applied thickly and in a very painterly way. The painting was originally with Annina Nosei, and was subsequently shown at the Documenta VII in 1982. It is similar in style to Ii Duce, 1982, a masterpiece of expression portraying Mussolini. Both paintings have very visible regions of underpainting that suggest a quite different image than the final one we are confronted with. The drawing Mussolini, 1983 also references the Italian dictator and uses a historical entry as a backdrop for a boxer, an academic study of a foot, perhaps of a Greek or Roman statue, and a barge in which a number of passengers are being rowed over water. The red writing in Russian means footwear, a word appropriately placed directly underneath the naked foot.

Profit I, 1982 repeats the image in Saint. It is one of the most important paintings done by Basquiat in Modena. Emiho Mazzoli had given the artist his first one-man exhibition there in May 1981 and had invited him to return for a second. Mazzoli gave Basquiat approximately eight large canvases, paint supplies and organised a space in which the artist could work. The exhibition never took place, but two of these paintings were shown in the museum in Modena that year in an exhibition comparing new Italian and American art.

Bruno in Appenzell, 1982, shows the stretcher bars crossing at the corners in what is the best known of the self-made support styles. 13

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Although painted in New York, the subject matter is a trip to Appenzell in Switzerland that Basquiat was taken on by Bruno Bischofberger. In the nineteenth century a number of self-taught, naive painters were active in Appenzell. The best of them can be considered amongst the greatest Swiss artists of all time.

Bischofberger is shown in his car, using his cellular telephone, the transmission conducted into the air in the form of lightning above his crowned head. In the distance we see the trees and the Santis mountain, the highest in Appenzell, the depiction of which is a staple in all Appenzell paintings. ESSEN refers to one of Basquiat and Bisehofberger's favourite occupations while there, namely eating at restaurants in which farmers and farmhands congregate in traditional dress and try to outdo each other in an archaic form of wordless singing. The Bull Show drawings of 1983 (p.58-61), with their frequent reference to BRATWURST (sausage), were also done near Appenzell, in Neu St. Johann. Basquiat completed the four drawings in an adjacent hotel room where he had gone to rest because of jet lag. The written lists are the menu of a restaurant, with prices. Basquiat must have been particularly impressed with KUTTELN, being the only translation he writes:

TRIPE

TRIPE

TRIPE

Carbon Datin4 Systems Versus Scratchproof Tape, 1982, is the same colour as Bruno in Appenzell and some of the same themes appear. The instrument panel of the ear is included, and the phrase MIT ROESTI, crossed out at top, means with hash browns. It may be a coincidence but Bischofberger's two brothers both are DOCTOR OF MEDICINE, and hence the mention of TWO PHD.

Swiss Son, 1983 was painted on the terrace of the Bischofberger residence in St. Moritz. On the right we see Bischofberger with his son Magnus. In the background are skilifts and trees, as well as the white of snow. On the bottom left are the inscriptions on the Gothic ceiling of 14

Extract from Basquiat – Museo Revoltella Downloaded from www.marenzi.com All text © Luca Marenzi 2003 Pay for Soup/Build a Fort/ Set that on Fire the Pensiun Castle, a small restaurant and boarding house in Sils Baselgia, just up the Engadine valley from St. Moritz.

The Pilgrimage, 1982, is a beautiful and highly complex painting in which the blue paint underneath acts as a sky and also as water. The canvas is on a self made stretcher that threatens to come through the canvas. It shows three methods of transport: airplane, sailing boat and camel, horse or mule. A bishop, who might represent one of the three Kings who seek out Jesus on the day of his birth, has opted for the most modest form of transport, the camel. Perhaps the painting can be read as a metaphor for the marriage of simple methods and noble ends in painting.

The boxers painted in 1982 are important to Basquiat because they act as potential role models: fighters. Cassius, 1982, offers a host of insights. Clay was a child prodigy. He ran next to the school bus he was not allowed to sit in and used the exercise to get stronger. He won the gold medal in Light Heavyweight boxing at the Olympics, age twenty. He had a big mouth, as is evident from the painting, confidently predicting he would beat Sonny Liston in a title fight two years before it was even arranged, and having virtually no professional boxing experience. He was also a poet with talent and wit. "I ask not what boxing can do for me, but what I can do for boxing." Muhammad Ali would mean something completely different.

"Basquiat's line does not seem to me an expressionistic one, for it is a line with a characteristic distinguishable in these times: its attitude is not emotional but critical. A paradigmatic phrase inscribed in one of his paintings - K, 1982 - is "disease culture," and sickness is certainly one of the artist's themes. Yet the line is proof, for him and for us, of the elasticity and clarity of seeing." On the left we see a depiction of an African mask that belonged to Basquiat. Aopkhes, the Egyptian pharaoh, helps to give the painting its name. At the top is written SEPARATION OF THE “K”. The green AOPKHES on the right panel is cut in three by two white lines, isolating the letter at centre - K.

In 1983 Basquiat does a number of paintings which are the closest to resolution he will ever get. They balance colours, forms and words into images that are whole, finished, and collected. They represent a rare 15

Extract from Basquiat – Museo Revoltella Downloaded from www.marenzi.com All text © Luca Marenzi 2003 Pay for Soup/Build a Fort/ Set that on Fire resting point, an asymptote, in his oeuvre. Napoleonic Stereotype circa `44, Early Moses (p.63) and Ornon Gum, belong to this group, and in a more softly spoken way, Big Shoes. In contrast to many of Basquiat's paintings they leave very little for the critic to say. Their content seems to be neutralised by the genius of its presentation. It is hard to imagine better paintings than this.

"Big Shoes (1983)... may seem somewhat empty and spare compared to more densely worked paintings by the artist, all of Basquiat's overriding themes are contained in this one work. Basquiat's reference to Autobiography is contained in the centre of the right panel where a caricature of one of the artist's serious girlfriends, Suzanne Mallouk, is seen wearing platform shoes, identified as BIG SHOES. References to Black Heroes are made in the cartoons of fighting black boxers in the lower right of the canvas, recalling Basquiat's interest in Sugar Ray Robinson and Cassius Clay; and in the drawing of a baseball, that hints at Basquiat's veneration of ballplayers, Hank Aaron and Jack Robinson. In addition, the word PREE, written in the upper left, is the name of jazz musician Charlie Parker's daughter.

Cartoon images are seen in the upper right and lower left of the canvas. In comic book depictions of colliding fists with the words BAP! BIP! Anatomical references are included in the irregular, oval outline in the upper centre, identified as SHOULDER, and by the collaged sketches of legs, feet, hands, and head which are probably derived from anatomical studies by Leonardo da Vinci.

At the centre of the canvas is an outlined box containing the words ORIGIN OF COTTON. This is an especially meaningful phrase, and contains multiple references to: Autobiography, Graffiti, Racism and Money. This phrase is one that Basquiat himself spray-painted on building walls during his SAMO graffiti period; it makes reference to the blacks of the Deep South enslaved on cotton plantations; and the phrase additionally refers to the monetary value of cotton-its origin, growth, harvest and sale. And lastly, an oblique reference to Death occurs in the upper left, where there appear a Christian cross and the birth and death dates (1951-53) of Charlie Parker's infant daughter, PREE."

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Basquiat might have improvised a large painting while doing a number of smaller ones in Toussaint L'Overture Versus Savonarola, 1983 (p.54-55). Fran~ois Dominique Toussaint L'Ouverture, at right, was a black revolutionary who at the fringe of the French revolution became a military leader and went on to declare the independence of the island on which Haiti and the Dominican Republic are now located. He was called the black Napoleon, hence the hat in this painting. Two frames to the left we see Savonarola, who was burnt at the stake in Florence in the High Renaissance, arguably for preaching against the excesses of art. Basquiat might have seen himself as L'Ouverture, and the thought of burning an unfavourable critic or two at the stake might have appealed to him.

Discography one and two, both from 1983, contain the names of many of Basquiat's favourite jazz musicians. The stark simplicity of the two paintings sets them apart from most of the other paintings, and were done in connection with the real record cover that Basquiat designed in the same year, Beat Bop. "There was a series of paintings I think he did for Bruno Bischofberger, where each painting was just a discography. He would write very beautifully in a cool, cryptic kind of style on a black background. He immortalised those records in a way that blended with his style, and at the same time let you know what he was into, and that it was very much a part of where he was coming from. But always with a twist and a sense of humour. In contrast to the discographies which have text and no images, some paintings from 1983 and `84 have little or no words, letters or numbers. "Take Rodo of 1984. Stylistic means are intense and sparing: blue person, red garment, brown and black chair, white walls, and purple sky through window. There are no texts. The lips of the figure strikingly depart from the bony rictus of Basquiat skulls and masks. The white works well, compressing chair and figure. The latter is stylistically tortured, in a Francis Bacon sort of way. In addition, the acid purple in the window possibly traces to the same British hand."

Two exceptional drawings with little or no text made at the same time should be noted here. Photographer, 1983, shows Basquiat as his photo is being taken. The photographer is Andy Warhol, his blond wig on his head. Basquiat is coming down some stairs, maybe those at Area night club which opened in that year and where Basquiat's was a 17

Extract from Basquiat – Museo Revoltella Downloaded from www.marenzi.com All text © Luca Marenzi 2003 Pay for Soup/Build a Fort/ Set that on Fire regular. Abuelita and the power CCRP, 1983, done in the same vein, is a powerful portrait of Basquiat's grandmother, which is what Abuelita means in Spanish.

In 1984 Basquiat started to spend a significant amount of time with Warhol. Brown Spots of that year shows Warhol as a banana, even though it is only the wig that gives the game away. It was hung on a wall by itself in the Mary Boone exhibition of 1984, while the other paintings were jammed together on other walls by Basquiat, even though Boone advised him to hang the show more sparsely. Molasses, 1983, with its supremely attractive colour scheme, harks back to Untitled, 1981. Maurice, 1983, shows us a monumental memento mori, a large skull at left. Molasses and Maurice are two of only three paintings that Basquiat made with encaustic, a type of wax, mixed with the oil paint, and are examples of the artist's eagerness to experiment with new techniques and materials. "Mention of music leads to a visual essay in cultural portraiture, P-Z. Basquiat captures in his shorthand the `look' of black male hip-hop attire, circa 1984. One brother in dreadlocks, with frontal face, vaunts a modified baseball jacket, with V-form white elastic edge, and so hiking boots. The other, in a sub-Saharan green pillbox hat, gaze averted but intimidating, suggests a master in Afro-Atlantic learning, steeped in knowledge associated with the African mask which floats before his chest. The frontal figure recalls the black photographer Stephen Crichiow en route to the Roxy and a night on the town with masters of breaklng and electric boogie." This painting was apparently a favourite of Basquiat's, and one to which he felt personally very attached. Bruno Bisehofloerger recalls Basquiat only selling it on the condition that it not be sold on.

"The drummer Max Roach is one of the giants of twentieth century music. He studied Rada (creolized Dahomean-Yoruba) and Tetro (creolized Kongon) rhythmic phrasings in Haiti and brought back these gifts to jazz. Basquiat's Max Roach of 1984 honours his vision and his style.

Only the eyes of Roach appear. His body disappears in a shimmering mist of silver, absorbed in metal signatures of sound. In the history of black music the jazz battery-partially illustrated by Roach's high hat, 18

Extract from Basquiat – Museo Revoltella Downloaded from www.marenzi.com All text © Luca Marenzi 2003 Pay for Soup/Build a Fort/ Set that on Fire bass drum, and snare-represents a creative regathering, as John Szwed suggests, of Western instruments within African principles of overlapping choral sounding. African-born percussionists, performing in Kongo Square, New Orleans, in the early nineteenth century achieved this crucial synthesis of time and circumstance and bequeathed it to the world.

Pink, white and red revolve around the drums. There is underpainting, left within the red. Laura Watt, a young New York painter, remarks "Basquiat leaves these traces to make you move, following the red around." The drums themselves bear hints of gold, as part of their importance. By this time, the lessons of Kline and the lessons of Twombly had long since done their duty. Accordingly, the abstract allusions are non-specific." Listening to the music that Clifford Brown and Roach played at Basin Street, New York in 1956 is instructive. When the first drum solo sets in we are transported swiftly and effortlessly into the deepest and darkest primal jungle. As the saxophone breaks back in we suddenly realise that we are still in the seething, steamy city. A truly magnificent effect that is repeated at will by the two musicians. Like Basquiat, though, Roach is a sophisticate: he teaches at the University of Massachusetts.

"The passion of Basquiat's jazz humanism gave rise to another landmark painting, Zydeco of 1984. During the eighties and earlier, a resurgent form of Afro-Lonisianian music, known as zydeco, became an element of the New York night. Basquiat knew this world. It was part and parcel of his love of jazz-related musics. He caught the impact and the affect of zydeco performance in a triptych that suggest, first, the general background of the Afro-Atlantic aesthetic of the cool, and second, the actual playing of this accordion-based music amidst icons of work and continuity, and, finally, the outward flow of the music in film, radio, photography, and recording.

In the first panel at left, silhouetted blacks seat themselves, like fugitives from Ancient Egypt, beside a partial rendering of the famous crescent-surmounted Kuto mbulu-nguluu (reliquary guardian) which allegedly sparked the first sub-Saharanizing moments of Picasso's style. The reliquary, partially erased with stokes of brown, appears on a square of white. Kline's black becomes an icebox with a freezer. A 19

Extract from Basquiat – Museo Revoltella Downloaded from www.marenzi.com All text © Luca Marenzi 2003 Pay for Soup/Build a Fort/ Set that on Fire four-mask blazon transforms another refrigerator, identified as a Westinghouse, into African heraldry.

A square of pure white appears directly below the Westinghouse. Given this proximity, it very likely refers to ice. In addition, by 1984, the hip-hop take on transatlantic cool, ice-names (Ice Cube, Ice-T, Icey Ice, et al.) was already confirmed. Basquiat, who himself in speech used cool to designate assent, not moderation of coldness, almost assuredly wired the meaning of this panel into that special metaphor.

In the central panel a figure with classic sub-Saharan features plays the accordion. Basquiat identifies his sound with insistent naming (ZYDECO/ZYDECOIZY- DECO). He embeds the music in contexts of work (MICRO PHONEI PICKAX/WOOD).

The word "zydeco" traditionally derives from the Cajun creolization of standard French for green beans (i.e. less haricots). This lends appropriateness to the unifying green that cuts across the triptych.

The third panel depicts horizons of black cultural transmission: photography (BOX CAMERA), recording (VITAPHONE), and the movies (EARLY SOUND FILM). The black of the camera completes the beat of the two refrigerators painted black. Basquiat himself, in an African mask, may well be shown doing some of the filming. He details black conquests of the media against a guided flux of visual sensations.

Amongst the most significant things that Basquiat would do in 1984 and `85 were the three-way and two-way collaborations, treated in great detail in the text in this book by Bruno Bisehofberger. Basquiat and Warhol would swap styles on occasion so that Basquiat used silk- screen and Warhol painted and drew by hand. Basquiat even did a small number of monotypes in 1985. The collaborations turned out to be truly remarkable. Although both Warhol and Basquiat were shot down in the press, they must have had a great time together. It was only when the relationship itself became the subject of (art) criticism that a serious problem arose. Basquiat felt unnerved that people would think Warhol was using him, and did not want to be seen as his mascot. 20

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Basquiat continued to paint mysterious and great paintings such as Bayou, 1985, in which he applied the large painting aesthetic he had developed while working on the collaborations. He also did not lose his capacity to draw masterpieces such as Selfportrait, 1985, an auto- dissection where the input of a multitude of eyes is generating a storm in the brain. A mind-blowing drawing in more ways than one.

Worthy Constituents, 1986 was painted in St. Moritz. The streaks we can see at the bottom are coffee which Basquiat poured on the canvas before painting over most of it. On the left we see jazz musicians. "Jean had begun listening to a lot of jazz and a lot of bebop. I went by to see him one day, and we were hanging out and talking. I remember telling him a story that Max Roach told to me about this particular record, Jazz at Massey Hall. Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were having a feud at that time. And in this one song-which was one of the few times Charlie Parker's voice was ever heard on a record-Parker introduced the song as having been written by his worthy constituent, Dizzy Gillespie. He said, Now we would like to play a tune that we sincerely hope you do enjoy, "Salt Peanuts." And they go into "Salt Peanuts," and it was clearly and distinctly a major duel between C.P. and D.G. Both were blowing as fast and as intricate and as intense as they could." This is a good summary of what Basquiat's art was about. He tried to paint as fast and intricate and intense as he could. On the right of the painting we see vehicles, one of which is an ambulance. In Basquiat's mind the permanent sound of sirens in the city might have developed its own kind of music, and he felt its absence in the Swiss Alps.

Towards the end Basquiat is visibly losing heart and his detachment is growing more visible. NOTHING BE GAINED HERE, he writes in TV star, 1988. The drawings, such as Root of Lung, Alto Saxophone and Vitaphone all of 1986, show the first steps to a level of almost manic detail far beyond what we can seee in the paintings, which perhaps were simply the most difficult to execute, given the larger doses of drugs Basquiat was taking during the last two years of his life. In fact, many of the great paintings of the later years, such as Pegasus, 1987 are huge drawings mounted on canvas.

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What better way of parting company than the way that Suzanne Mollouk did at the memorial service held on 5 November 1988 at St. Peter’s Church:

Poem for Basquiat, 1984, by A. R. Penck …the struggle against the past would be tomorrow with x-ray eyes through the stone walls through the mountains of flesh through the brain projections self-inflections through all the books of mathematics physics politics

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