Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,924

This is the grave of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Born in 1960 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, Basquiat was half-Haitian and half-Puerto Rican. His mother was a big art fan and she took her kids to museums all the time, at a time when I would guess families of color were not exactly always welcomed in them, even in New York. Basquiat loved drawing from the time he was a small child and his parents really encouraged him in this. Now, he almost died at the age of 7 after being hit by a car. That was a very bad year for him for another reason–his parents split. His mother’s declining mental health soon meant institutionalization and he grew up mostly with his father after that. For awhile, the family moved to Puerto Rico in the mid 70s, but Basquiat came back to Brooklyn for high school. But by this time, he was a real mess. He was already starting to use drugs. His mother’s decline really threw him for a loop and he started sleeping on the streets and doing LSD. Finally, his father found him and called the police to get him home.

Things improved for Basquiat a bit after that, but he would struggle with drugs and mental health for the rest of his short life. He remained a terrible student, but his alternative school had teachers who encouraged him when he could and that mostly was around his artistic talent. He started drawing cartoons for the school newspaper. He also got super into the graffiti culture dominating New York at that time. Of course everyone saw this as street thuggery at the time, ignoring the very real artistic talent behind much of it. Basquiat had a partner named Al Diaz who became a graffiti team and their work started to get notice. That was good since his behavior was so disastrous that he was expelled from his school for shoving a pie in the principal’s face and then his father kicked him out of the house for it. This is definitely the first time in the grave series that someone has shoved a pie in someone’s face. May it not be the last.

By late 1978, the Village Voice started publishing notices about Basquiat’s graffiti work. He became a young star in New York’s art scene, embraced by a lot of hip artists of the period. Over the next couple of years, until he and Diaz had a falling out and ending their relationship, he continued to be a well known graffiti artist and rose slowly through those scenes. He was no slouch in self-promotion, that’s for sure. Once, he saw Andy Warhol in a restaurant. Basquiat happened to be selling a bunch of his postcard work on the street, so he went straight up to Warhol and told him to buy a postcard, which the artist did. Warhol would later become a big promoter of Basquiat’s work.

If the late 70s saw a troubled but important artistic figure rise in Basquiat, he became the iconic figure in the New York art scene of the 80s. He became more known not only in New York but in the international art scene as a fresh new voice who brought the streets into the tony art world. He started painting and sold his very first painting to Debbie Harry of Blondie. He was also cast in the Blondie video for “Rapture.” He quickly moved from showing his paintings with other people to having his own exhibitions, the first of which was in 1982. His work was in the Whitney Biennial in 1983, the youngest person shown that year.

Basquiat lived by various women supporting him through their jobs while he painted. He also relied on Warhol, like a lot. Warhol allowed him to move into one of his lofts in New York so he would have a steady place to live and work and he was there for the last few years of his life. He became a celebrity on both coasts. By complete coincidence, he started dating a young girl with hopes of becoming a famous singer. Her name was Madonna and she was completely unknown at the time. He really supported her and told his friends that she was going to be huge. He was pretty right about that one! Basquiat will also most definitely not be the last person in this series to have had sex with Madonna. I feel like Norm MacDonald here with that one. I should start telling some OJ jokes.

For the rest of his short life, Basquiat was a constantly rising star in the art universe. His work was deeply affected by life in New York for Black people in the 80s, which was pretty terrible in this era of urban decline, drugs, and police violence. When cops killed his friend Michael Stewart during an arrest for graffiti, Basquiat was deeply affected. Of course it could have been him. The racist cops didn’t give a shit whether he was famous–for them, these were animals destroying the city unlike their good Italian families who had all moved to Long Island anyway. So he painted about this experience too.

Basquiat also very much understood the media and how to take advantage. He took after his cynical capitalist friend Warhol here, who had much to teach on how to manipulate idiots into good stories about you. So for example, unlike a normal person, Basquiat would choose to paint while in an expensive Armani suit. Then he would wear the same suit, now covered in paint, to go to fancy New York parties. This is very stupid, very art world, and very 80s.

Now, Basquiat also learned from Warhol how to become rich. The money really started flowing by the mid 80s. This did not help him. All the money did was create opportunities to buy better heroin and cocaine. His drug habits became totally ridiculous and completely uncontrolled, another perfect convergence of the 80s and the art world. He destroyed his septum from all the cocaine. This was George Jones level stuff here. He routinely combined that with heroin, which even the Possum didn’t do. Snorting heroin became a favorite activity.

So yeah, the drugs killed him. He was at the top of the world and was just totally unable to handle it and perhaps didn’t want to. I find the whole romanticizing of Basquiat’s life tiresome, much like I do with Chet Baker and other drug users who are not romantic figures at all. They are fuckups. I get why people do drugs, sure. But I do not get the whole “they are tortured heroes” bullshit that dominated so much of American culture between the 60s and about 2000. It just sucks that Basquiat died, in 1988, at the age of 27. And oh my fucking god, please stop with the Age 27 romantic bullshit that came from the all the rockers dying at that age. Just stop. There’s nothing good about any of this at all. It’s just a sad damn story. I haven’t seen the feature film about Basquiat that comes out of this romanticizing him and I don’t intend to.

Anyway, here’s some of Basquiat’s work and we can imagine what he’d be doing today.

In conclusion, fuck cocaine and fuck heroin.

Jean-Michel Basquiat is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other American artists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Jackson Pollock is in East Hampton, New York and Andrew Wyeth is in Cushing, Maine. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.