Jean-Michel Basquiat is a myth, a grinning prodigy and a brooding martyr. The star with a graffiti pedigree charmed hipsters and billionaires, and then ended a downspin with a heroin overdose at 27. His paintings are what set records at auction, but almost anything that Basquiat made can be exhibited.
The Brooklyn Museum adds its two cents to Basquiat lore in “Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks”. It doesn’t hurt the show’s potential attendance that the Brooklyn-born Basquiat is a hometown hero, like Walt Whitman, Paul Auster or Jay-Z.
The eight previously un-exhibited notebooks on view bring a new dimension to Basquiat academicism. Don’t expect Leonardo’s drawings. This is writing, for the most part. The notebooks—standard school pupil issue—are unbound for the exhibition and displayed on stark walls and in equally stark vitrines. On the pages are carefully printed inscriptions, with occasional pictures and telephone numbers noted on the same pages. Seven notebooks were acquired by the collector Larry Warsh from a former member of Gray, Basquiat’s band. Warsh purchased another one from a private collector.
It is a lot for the Basquiat complete-ist, but there will be more: a facsimile version of the notebooks, edited by Warsh, will be published this summer by Princeton University Press. Scholars, for whom footnotes are crucial, will thank Warsh and the Brooklyn Museum for turning these footnotes into an exhibition.
The notebooks are more hermetic bellwethers than biographical diaries. The sets of handwritten pages are solemn minimalist notations that Basquiat made before his pictures took on the entropic gestural restlessness for which they are known. The pages are grey, neatly inscribed (even when words are crossed out) and enigmatic. The language, written when Basquiat was 20 and 21, makes the sophistries of Jenny Holzer seem eloquent. To be fair, Basquiat didn’t attempt to publish any of this. Here is an example:
I FEEL LIKE A CITIZEN IN THIS PARKING LOT COUNTY FAIR
IT’S TIME TO GREYHOUND AND COME BACK A DRIFTER
PUT IT ALL IN ONE BAG
Another page reads:
RUBBER MONEY AT A BUFFET
CARTS OF SHREDDED WHEAT
LOOT
BOOTY
RANSOM
INFESTED BATHROOMS
HIGHER MONKEYS
SPRING ONIONS
THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD
A few paintings punctuate the gallery space. Untitled, 1982-3, on loan from the Los Angeles dealer Fred Hoffman, extends the words-as-medium conceit with its surface of 28 densely inscribed sheets, on which Basquiat painted a large black and white head with a grey arrow pointing upward. The painting offers a clever paradox: Basquiat is standing the typical practice of graffiti on its head, smearing a picture onto a wide field of text.
In works like these, the writing draws in your eye and suggests a mass of thoughts and ideas from which an image might arise. Even when Basquiat shifted to more conventional painting, he continued to write on canvas until his death. Words that he arranged like free-form constellations became part of his painterly language, although almost all his paintings, in which he worked with oil-sticks, seem like big colorful drawings. In 1985, Basquiat tried that collage approach on Untitled, a cube covered with 8 1/2 by 11 inch sheets of words and images, mounted on a wood box. The work, also on loan from Larry Warsh, is one of the surprises on view.
Yet this show of contextual material needs context. The exhibition can give the impression that Basquiat shifted from plain language on paper to drawings and paintings that either incorporated writing or used written surfaces as canvases. He did, but he was also drawing and sketching constantly while these notebooks were compiled. Terse and colorless in the notebooks, Basquiat was only a minimalist (for a short while) if you exclude the profusion of images that he was making at the same time.
All the better for a myth of martyrdom, for which “Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks” offers a sliver of pre-history. In exhibitions of Old Master paintings, drawings are often presented as diagrams or sketches that lead into finished works, or as ideas that evolved in sheet after sheet into what began to resemble a grander painting. In Brooklyn, the curators are acting more as archaeologists, revealing the notebooks as an approach to writing from which Basquiat would evolve, suggesting a young man in full who was bigger than his pictures.
After struggling to decode Basquiat’s musings, you leave the exhibition with the clear judgment that he was a more gifted artist than he was a writer, and that it was his pictures that make his words worth reading today. Don’t expect that to be a serious caveat: the Basquiat cult is sizable, more than that of any New York artist from the 1980’s, including Keith Haring. The crowds are sure to file through, even though visitors are likely to conclude that Basquiat’s other work was what brought them there.
Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks, Brooklyn Museum, until 23 August