is anyone wanna thinks about that Jean-Michel Basquiat?

didn't really "get" his art back in the day, maybe I was blinded by the hype. but that retrospective of a couple years back was a revelation. love the jazzy, improvised feel. and all the floating words numbers figures etc that seemed so cryptic and/or random in the 80s now scream out INFO AGE OVERLOAD. charlie parker w/a paint brush, "hip-hop bebop" genius.

heroin sucks.

i don't know that much about him but i like his art a lot.

so 'downtown 81' - the soundtrack was apparently lost (e.g. saul williams was dubbed in for basquiat's voice) - what about the music then, was it dubbed in too?

Love his work, saw a retrospective in Paris by coincidence an dI was blissed. I'm reading a book about him and the 80's downtown art-scene in general, seemed he was a bit of a brat generally.

Which is funny cause he Basquiat looked kinda cool and righteous in photographs, I always assumed that Haring was a brat cause he looks like one and it appears to be the total opposite.

good point mark cl, I haven't seen the film in a while but a great deal of the dialogue was commentary from Saul Williams from what I remember. The music scenes played out kinda like music videos. I will dig out the DVD and watch it. If you take Downtown 81 for what it is (not a great film but) a collection of a few of the people from the No Wave / Ze era bound together in a loose story, it's worthwhile.

In terms of Basquit's art, I saw a retrospective in Paris about 2003, and was impressed. The piece had such amazing texture and were almost 'live' works. He was a talent for sure.

Dig the artist, hated the movie. However, David Bowie should be the only person allowed to portray Andy Warhol for ever and ever amen.

massively overrated by some, weirdly hated on by others. leaving aside the historical baggage, dude probably a 50 percent hit-to-miss ratio for putting together an interesting collection of symbols when not zonked out of his fucking mind.

though the man had personal style, i have to give him that.

like his stuff. have a book of stuff/about him that i haven't read. oops.

love the film, just since it's getting berated. as something entirely separate from the artist but still.

tried to find my favourite basquiat drawing online of a mule eating oats but couldn't.

I'm a little jealous of Lars Ulrich being able to see something in it that I can't -- the thought that Lars Ulrich is somehow a more artistically sensitive human being than me is unbearable -- so please help explain Basquiat to me. Is each piece standalone or is it meant to be understood in the entirety of his output? (I'm having trouble parsing out meaning from individual pieces)

the thought that Lars Ulrich is somehow a more artistically sensitive human being than me is unbearable

LOL. Sorry, couldn't but laugh (out loud no less) at this. I know what you mean, even though I know I should find it wrong.

Dude was with Madonna for a while, no? Christ, who didn't she fuck?

I like his art. Not blown away by it.

we are all jealous of lars.
but basquiat was just another punker-graffiti kid until rene ricard wrote about him in artforumdecember 1981. in this article, mr ricard entertains the notion that mr basquiat's work, "looks like art."

now that's a terrific sentence i am jealous of. fuck lars, he has his fantastically obnoxious ego to live with.

http://srjerman.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/15basquiat_30.jpg

xp - the best scene in Some Kind of Monster was one of the deleted scenes, where Lars yells at someone for not telling him that the party had a hawaiian shirt theme.

http://aidenvastephen.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/basquiat-untitled_1981_jpg1.jpg

http://gawker.com/5085942/metallica-drummer-and-his-basquiat-save-christies

http://www.artdaily.org/imagenes/2008/06/13/Sothebys-2.jpg
i guess the band U2 just sold this one recently

kindof think he has a horrible feel for composition but a really great mannered markmaking that seems a lot cooler in the company of ppl like Richard Aldrich or Stefan Muller (in that it's actually quite awkward and not exactly as fluid and energetic as the received wisdom on it goes), a load of these look absolutely great if you just look at them in detail format, but he's kinda let down by some of his colour choices I think, and he's pretty bad at using the edge of the picture plane. Not as bad as his detractors would claim or as good as his fanboys, but you knew that baby.

it's actually quite awkward and not exactly as fluid and energetic as the received wisdom on it goes

Exactly.

I actually think the collabs with warhol that use the GE logo are kinda good, but warhol provides some structure for him to work with and he seems to need that maybe.

gis gave me this, i'd like to see it in the real

http://www.maxskansascity.com/warhol/images/slideshow5/02.jpg

looking at the examples pictured above, I think his composition is fine, but the mark-making is what is the most awkward (granted, it's intentional) - but then I'm not a huge fan of the expressionism that preceded him.

the one you just posted is the most interesting to me.

http://i386.photobucket.com/albums/oo305/lejospopo/basquiat.jpg

As far as composition goes, I'm thinking of the placement of the larger elements ...

I think almost every painting, with the exception of the warhol collab can be improved by cutting up, and my reasoning is because of how he tries to really rigidly contain everything, but he's not really skilled enough to make the compositions work that way, they could all benefit with having the eye led out, esp the most neglected parts of the painting are the most interesting to me, that blue triangle on the pink square is a really nice little gesture, I like the drips on the right hand side of the O, those little purple fingers creeping into the salmon on the left hand side. None of those come across as particularly spontaneous, would have liked to see how he handled stuff that used more text than what he did, the O in OREJA is excellent and that gnarled drawing is cooler in the text than in the mask like faces which are hella lame imo. He's better at little touches like that cute crown, but he doesn't know how to use them cumulatively, which I assume he's trying to.

I think he was good at all the virtuoso stuff, but he didn't have such a good grasp on the basics.

yeah ... it's a bit too all-over for me ... the drips around the O are really good. I like the bottom half better than the top half. The mask-like faces don't do it for me either.

I'm also curious if that cerulean blue patch is just from rubbing white into the navy, cos i'm into stuff like that.

I just cropped it like that because I like the shape of the navy patch way better as something to hang the painting on. Does anyone know if he only ever painted on rectangular canvases?

xp - will try and remember to ask my better half about that ... he would be likely to know.

julian schnabels paintings are completely irredeemable.

but... how do you guys tell what he's trying to do? The only thing I can suss from the oreja painting is there's an ear there which is emphasized with "oreja" written in the same color, and a lightning bolt in a ballot check box next to a game of hangman? So he's telling us to "listen and vote together or we will hang separately"? From the article posted above, the crown is a signature, so is maybe not part of the painting proper? How do you begin to identify compositional mistakes if the purpose is unclear? When Lars looks at his painting, he's got this expression like he's figured it out. smug bastard!

xp - me and the bf like making fun of how awful schnabel is. He's really v cute when he rants about Schnabel.

why identify compositional mistakes from a composer who never went to composin' schoolz? i mean what's the point? jean-michel is tactile not cerebral. sure he's high as a kite and thinkin about some shit, but imo he's about anger/raw emotion and very anti-art. so trying to analyze it through the art canon gets nowhere. his "drawings" were lists of wordz someone said er wrote.

why identify compositional mistakes from a composer who never went to composin' schoolz? i mean what's the point?

because he was an artist and made art, and composition is a part of art? It's like if you were to be a self-taught engineer and make your own hot-dog cooking device. People would still evaluate it like a professionally designed hot-dog cooking device. Does it cook the hot dogs effectively? Do the hot dogs look appetizing after cooking them with your device?

so trying to analyze it through the art canon gets nowhere

How dare you analyze a painting by comparing it to other paintings?

good point. but what i think i was trying to get across was that criticism through formalist art theory somehow dilutes the emotional content (or potential for emotional connection) that is there. if people get stuck on the fact that mr basquiat "is pretty bad at using the edge of the picture plane" then are they getting the intense horror and paranoia? painting as a form for getting across raw emotion gives no thought to the edge of the picture plane.

but as a viewer, "the edge of the picture plane" could be a hindrance to that emotional connection or the effectiveness of the communication of the intense horror and paranoia, etc.

"effectiveness of the communication of the intense horror and paranoia"

I'll vouch for this because it did not communicate horror and paranoia to me. Was it supposed to?

man, rene ricard needed an editor. like, an actual one. not just the dude on the artforum masthead at the time.

also, basquiat's focus on gesture is inherently formalist, its more about the staging or deployment of the imagery than the imagery itself. I mean, a lot of it looks A LOT like Pollock circa '82, esp with the numbers and stuff. One of the things I really appreciate about Basquiat is that he seems to be consciously restaging and expanding and playing with early Pollock, and I find him to be an extremely reverent painter (god this violent brushwork and african mask stuff is kinda Picasso too, I think one of the only signs that he didn't go to art school are that his references are extremely canonical and obviously signposted within the work)

why identify compositional mistakes from a composer who never went to composin' schoolz? i mean what's the point? jean-michel is tactile not cerebral. sure he's high as a kite and thinkin about some shit, but imo he's about anger/raw emotion and very anti-art. so trying to analyze it through the art canon gets nowhere. his "drawings" were lists of wordz someone said er wrote.

― Don't hag me with your false green. (jdchurchill), Friday, September 18, 2009 12:32 AM (21 hours ago)

also, basically all art is reactionary and anti-art, I mean is this more anti-art than the conceptual art of the previous decade? It's still fairly traditional oil-based painting and I would say fairly conservative at that.

plax are you talking about jackson pollock? he was very dead in '82. and mr basquiat has been referred to as "the black picasso." and yea i suppose anytime you got canvas and paint that's pretty quintessential "art."

i mean he was "neo-expressionist" which is to say that he was trying to express something. what i get from many of his paintings is very frightening. however i suppose that is a general response i have to stuff.

http://images.artnet.com/aoa_lot_images/15168/0_527_550.jpg
this one is currently bidding $9500

'His work from the first consisted of conceptual, enigmatic combinations of words and symbols, executed with the curt simplicity of a late Roman inscription,' according to Henry Geldzahler, longtime curator of twentieth-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

'I was surprised to see a black artist and particularly one that was—you know—with the hair. I was taken back by it, and kind of put off.'-Larry Gagosian

didn't know he was in club 27, too

plax are you talking about jackson pollock? he was very dead in '82. and mr basquiat has been referred to as "the black picasso." and yea i suppose anytime you got canvas and paint that's pretty quintessential "art."

― Don't hag me with your false green. (jdchurchill), Friday, September 18, 2009 10:57 PM (Yesterday

haha, I meant circa '42!

http://www.earlham.edu/~vanbma/20th%20century/images/pollock%20male%20and%20female%201942.bmp

Male and Female invented Basquiat!

also, jazz as a synonym for "black" and "messy" is borderline offensive.

yo plax male and female invented all of us dinit? but those are numbaz and not wordz, eh? that's kinda what facinates me about mr basquiat's oeuvre is the directness of connotation that the words provide coupled with the images.

"also, jazz as a synonym for "black" and "messy" is borderline offensive."
huh?

hey sorry, just one of the links you had starts going on about jazz which is what white ppl start saying when black ppl make messy paintings

and it seems like jean-michel basquiat was one of the first black ppl to make paintings that were taken seriously by the ivory tower. also i saw some youtube where mr basquiat was painting and there was jazz in the background.

and it seems like jean-michel basquiat was one of the first black ppl to make paintings that were taken seriously by the ivory tower.

uh, not really:
http://academic.evergreen.edu/c/czalau28/Bearden.jpg

what the sarahel? no seriously; good point. i did say seems cuz i dint fact check. good goddamn tho thanks cuz i consider myself a collage-ist. and that's also where the fascination lies: taking direct examples of what one would like to be the image and using it as the image or abstraction of what the image is supposed to represent. you know, like in picasso's famous use of the chair caning:

http://www.brown.edu/Courses/CG11/2005/Group024/Picasso-Still_Life_with_Chair-Caning-synthetic_cubism.jpg

the story goes he couldn't draw it very well so he just found a chair and used the actual caning.

I'm overdue for a re-evaluation of the man and his work, now that I am no longer an adoring 17 year old. Although on a purely aesthetic level, I can't deny they are very beautiful looking.

I like that when Julian Schnabel's bio movie came out, somebody reviewed it as 'worst living artist makes movie about worst dead artist'.
While I don't necessarily agree with it, this still made me laugh.

http://ardor.net/artlia/content/b/basquiat/basquiat_arroz_con_pollo.jpg

arroz con pollo

http://www.guggenheim-bilbao.es/uploads/fondos_propios/img/md/basquiat_hombre_napoles.jpg

http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/0cjJcxBdTdgsU/610x.jpg

the man from naples

http://a6.idata.over-blog.com/0/44/33/56/percapita.jpg

per capita

http://jordanross4.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/notary.jpg

the notary

http://www.graigcortelyou.com/basquait/images/gwalkinga.jpg

riding with death

I like that one

beat bop

produced by basquiat? fo sho: the cover art was.

http://www.thecityreview.com/f01pcon1e.gif

Saw this:
http://www.filmforum.org/films/basquiat.html

I can't say it's a great film but I have a feeling it would be very hard to make an uninteresting film about him since he was just so damned charismatic and interesting.

Definitely too worshipful, too fast and tries to cram in too many different narratives of his life, but worth seeing anyway. I definitely came away with more appreciation and understanding of his work. I think like a lot of people I went through a phase where I liked Basquiat because I thought he was cool and then another phase where I disliked his work because I thought I was too sophisticated for it. I came away thinking that Van Gogh actually is a good figure for comparison, at least in terms of the way I view Van Gogh -- an enormously talented and skilled painter with a singular style that doesn't quite represent any particular movement of his time, with enormous popular appeal and a tendency to overdo things.

Thanks Hurting, been looking forward to this.

yea was listening to npr and they interviewed tamra davis, would go see or rent or netflix that mofo
confused abt the name 'the radiant child' wasn't that keith haring's thing?

http://www.designboom.com/history/basquiat/16.jpg

Nobody?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3f/BeatBop.jpg

in response to something upthread: sam gilliam and alma thomas are two awesome african american painters who are very pre-basquiat. alma thomas was the first black woman to have a solo show at the whitney

Big Basquiat/Warhol collab retrospective in Copenhagen later this year, looking forward to seeing this. They did a lot more work than is really known about or widely seen, much more than their original disastrous 1985 show.

For those in Washington DC:

Sun. Oct. 9 "Downtown 81" movie doc starring late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and featuring James Chance, Amos Poe, Walter Steding, and Tav Falco, Doors Open at 3:30pm, Film Screens at 4:00pm {Free} Pre-Registration Strongly Encouraged. At the Corcoran https://getinvolved.corcoran.org/downtown81 Q&A Following the screening, Maripol and Michael Holman discuss the film, and the art and music scene in New York during the late 1970's and early 1980's.

This is the longest of long shot requests.

Are there any Danish dudes who can report back on the Warhol/Basquiat exhib that's just started at the Arken Museum outside Copenhagen, I'm considering heading over to see it but I wanna know how much there is before I do.

RIP René Ricard

http://galleristny.com/2014/02/rene-ricard-has-died/

Nobody appears to give a shit judging by this thread but anyway - http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b098pd3q/basquiat-rage-to-riches

I'd deffo love to go to that Barbican retrospective, only ever seen the odd JMB piece in the flesh, and that was 20 years ago.

At the Serpentine?

It's a great exhibition, lot's of paintings that I didn't expect to ever see irl, and quite a lot of the bigger well known works are totally absent.

yep it was at the Serpentine, but i had to do a quick google, in my memory it was a gallery in one of the royal parks that I couldn't remember the name of.

My partner is actually thinking of blowing the last dregs of her savings account to go this.

Well, 20 years since the last one, Paris and other places in Europe have had retrospectives fairly recently, soooo...

I've never thought much of his work but I'm ready to have my mind changed.

You can see irl JMBs at The Broad in LA for free

jesus, 16 quid to see an exhibition is a lot.

http://thesnobette.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/basquiat-skull-painting-620x413.jpg

This guy paid $110 million for the painting this past spring. I guess he's sending it on a world tour now.

I love Basquiat and the everyday is living in art thing that I romanticize his life to have been.

27 is such a ridiculous age to die.

I also like the album he put out with his band Gray:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fedmYKBom28

fun to watch this at .5% speed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExDfj-_D6Sk