Who was Jean-Michel Basquiat?

I wrote this piece about Basquiat back in 2012. Before everybody was obsessed, before the National Gallery of Victoria put him on display, and before I’d even graduated from university.

He was best friends with Andy Warhol, slept with Madonna, a multi-millionaire before his 25th birthday and dead by his 27th .

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an artist for the epoch. In his youth, conceptual and minimalistic art was at its height in New York City. This suited his random poetic graffiti, tagged under the pseudonym of SAMO (same old shit), to be found scrawled all over the lower east side.

Born in Brooklyn to an upper-middle class family, like Bob Dylan before him and Lady Gaga after him, Basquiat ran away from the comfort and mediocrity of his home life to be a part of the real New York. The New York where Debbie Harry, Vincent Gallo, Andy Warhol and yes, Madonna socialised and got drunk in underground punk bars. The New York where you couch surfed and searched for coins on the floor of a club. Where being homeless meant artistic integrity.

SAMO became famous within the counter-culture scene, an enigma to the ‘80s ‘it’ crowd, and this is where Basquiat found his platform. SAMO was poetry, it was abstract and nobody really understood it, which meant it was beyond cool. By 1980 Basquiat was twenty years old, firmly embedded within the creative social scene and showing at the illustrious Annina Nosei galley in SoHo alongside his former idols, now contemporaries, neo-expressionists Julian Schnabel and David Salle.

At the height of his success, Basquiat would travel back and forth between his fast paced and sometimes distracting New York life, and escape to L.A. where he could paint, chill out and oh, yeah, stop shooting up. Heroine fuelled Basquiat’s creativity. He was a celebrity – as much as a painter can be – to young New York.

But it was never enough. He wanted respect, acknowledgement from critics; he wanted to become an iconoclast.

But it was never enough. He wanted respect, acknowledgement from critics; he wanted to become an iconoclast. Undoubtedly, his allure back then and even now is his spontaneity. In his paintings everything appears rough, as if done on a whim, somewhat like his life. Basquiat always did what he wanted, followed his gut and this is brave. This is what we wish we had the balls to do.

God of pop art Andy Warhol, like so many others, was drawn to Basquiat’s elusive allure and the pair became fast friends. Their 1984 collaboration produced a delicious mash-up of graphic clarity and obscure scribbles and sketches. But Basquiat was insecure and paranoid. The critics panned the collaboration, saying Warhol was riding of the coattails of Basquiat’s success that was in fact only a fad. Basquiat became somewhat of a recluse. He withdrew from society, frequently escaped to Hawaii and indulged his by then rampant heroine addiction.

In the end, after all the success and money, he died no different that any other junkie. On August 12, 1988 Basquiat overdosed on heroine; his body found alone in his bed. Basquiat will forever be part of the infamous ’27 Club’; a collection of musicians and gifted souls who died at twenty-seven of which the likes of Jimmi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse are members.

Some people say that for great artists, life is too intense. They drown under the pressure of the very thing that makes them so brilliant – their talent. Basquiat had an intensity that plagued him. He was too internal, too sensitive, too passionate, too desperate for acceptance and too prone to self-destructive behaviour. Ironically, it was in death that he found the fame and approval as an artist that he so desperately craved in life.

Now days, if you’ve got a spare $1.6-13.5 million lying around (don’t we all) you can get your hands on a Basquiat original to hang on your wall...it would look perfect next to your Warhol Marilyn.

This piece was originally published in the now defunct Vulture Magazine.