A Novel Perspective on Basquiat's Artistic and Musical Career

New York / New Waves

The opening section of the exhibition is devoted to all aspects of Basquiat’s active participation in the New York music scene in the 1970s and 1980s, and is designed to immerse viewers in the culture of the time and place. It includes Basquiat’s paintings, drawings, notebooks, posters and photographs related to the music and musicians of New York, and provides contextual materials on the places he frequented and the different genres of music he encountered there.

Shaped by the radical freedom of punk, the example of Andy Warhol and the rejection of abstraction, minimalism and social conformity, the group of young artists emerging from the underground scene to which Basquiat belonged explored film, poetry, photography, painting, performance and music. Downtown Manhattan nightspots and lofts were the stomping grounds of a generation seeking to rethink practices and combine art with life, and within those walls its members found places to mingle, experiment and exhibit. Created in a city on the brink of bankruptcy, Basquiat’s works are in part borne on objects he recycled, and take up a form of expressiveness, spontaneity and rawness that resembles the manner in which musicians, who are often self-taught, use and find new ways of using their instruments.

The first section of the exhibition also aims to draw renewed attention to the performative aspects of Basquiat’s practice, including his participation in Gray as an unofficial leader of the band. In the words of Glenn O’Brien, cultural critic and creator of the public access television show TV Party, on which the artist appeared several times, Basquiat “was a performer. Whatever he did, he did it for the audience. The big audience. Not just who was in the room but who was in the loop, who was in the network, who was in the world, who was in the future.”

An admirer of jazz musicians’ capacity for invention and aware of the aesthetic issues specific to it – notably sophisticated improvisation as a form of spontaneous composition – Basquiat drew inspiration from the musical form in crafting his works, often shaping them with series of photocopies arranged and syncopated like the harmonic “chord charts” upon which jazz musicians build their solos. Through photocopies Basquiat also created dialogue between his works, much like jazz musicians riff on existing standards.

Basquiat and the Music of the Black Atlantic

Basquiat, who visited Africa in 1986 and returned with various instruments, was interested early on in the links between African and African American music, as his art reveals. The works on view in this gallery testify to how music was, for him, a means of engagement with diasporic legacies of the Atlantic slave trade. Whether referencing Creole music of Louisiana or connecting jazz with slave auctions, these works show Basquiat exploring the distinctive cultural forms that emerged from the forced migration of African people to Europe, the Caribbean and the Americas; in short, the culture of the Black Atlantic.

Among the important sources on which Basquiat drew was Robert Farris Thompson’s book Flash of the Spirit (1983), which delves into the persistence of African culture and tradition in the United States, and how music played an important role in the transmigration of cultural forms. Basquiat stated that Thompson was his favourite art historian, and commissioned the author to write for the catalogue of his second solo exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery in 1985. The show included several of his paintings featuring griots, North and West African musician-storytellers. In his essay for the book, Thompson described Basquiat as “an Afro-Atlanticist extraordinaire,” who “colours the energy of modern art (itself in debt to Africa) with his own transmutations of sub-Saharan plus Creole Black impress and figuration. He chants print. He chants body. He chants them in splendid repetitions.” The works on view here bring Basquiat’s “incantatory art” to light.

Eroica: Heroism, Music and Memory

This last gallery is devoted to Eroica I and Eroica II, paintings completed and exhibited in New York in 1988, the year of Basquiat’s death. Together, they offer a coda to the musicality of his art and, in some ways, to his life. Musical in ways both literal and metaphorical, they speak to the triumphs and the potential tragedy of heroism.

Eroica (Italian for heroic) was the title of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, which he originally dedicated to Napoleon. Upon learning that he had declared himself Emperor of France in 1804, the composer famously tore out the score’s title page in a fit of anger, crossed out Napoleon’s name and retitled his composition Eroica. Originally made on a single sheet of paper that Basquiat then tore in two to make this diptych, these two paintings bear traces of this story – but Beethoven is only one part of it.

The words and phrases in these paintings show Basquiat using rhythm, rhyme and language to establish visual and sonic analogies that create new meanings. He quotes a dictionary of African American slang, borrowing from the letter “B” section, to strike many chords at once, touching on Blackness and diasporic themes, as well as music, drugs and desire. For Basquiat, meaning was not made in a straight line, but sounded out across multiple fields of signification, association and interpretation.

Accompanied by an immersive sonic experience that features the music that inspired Basquiat and was inspired by him, these paintings ask us to reflect on the price of Basquiat’s fame and to recognize his heroism as a champion of Black artistry as well as the role that music played within it. Like his art and the music echoed within it, Basquiat continues to resonate powerfully to this day.