Jean Micheal Basquiat

‘Boom For Real’ is Jean Michel Basquiat’s first major London exhibition- a hugely ambitious show which invites viewers to re-evaluate an artist who died of a drug overdose at the age of 27 in 1988.

Basquiat is known as a painter, but this exhibition shows that he was much more than that – he was a writer, a musician,  a film-maker, a DJ,  a performance artist amongst many other things. He has been dismissively – remembered as a so-called ‘graffiti artist’, but the exhibition shows him as much more than that. He was a complex and brilliant painter, but also a figure with profound insights about figures in many different fields who have struggled against racism in America to express themselves and achieve fame and fortune.

It has been a hugely popular exhibition and has already gone a long way to bring a new generation to Basquiat’s work – and to an understanding of the society and culture in which it was created. What is unusual is that this show is so multi-media – packed with audio, film, music and photography. Which feels right because Basquiat didn’t just sit and paint in a little studio like the Impressionists – he was living a packed and chaotic life, dancing, making rap songs, movies. And of course taking a lot of drugs. You get a sense of what life was like in New York in the ‘80s, but also how Basquiat revelled in everything, mixing so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and putting it all into a blender. Out of the blender came his wild and vibrant and crazy art.

His ‘Self Portrait 1984’ is a case in point. At first glance it looks childlike. Look again and it feels very anguished. It feels to me like a very powerful  portrait of a man in pain. He’s not laughing.

Essentially he’s ripping back his own identity to show you the autonomy that’s within every human – and opening up his own  identity as a black man. In the video interview with Gus Casely Hayford that accompanies the online introduction to the exhibition, Nairne talks about the works having a sense of ‘Trauma’ – and that behind his representations of himself and other African Americans is a consciousness of the terrible legacy of slavery that brought black people to America.

The juxtaposition between the darkness of the skin tone and the vibrant white, red and blue  could be Basquiat’s way of suggesting this new way of black people becoming more involved in this western art and culture; which before Basquiat was mainly dominated by white people. Everything in this painting seems to be ripped apart, dishevelled, In some ways this could be his cry out for help. This is not an idealised picture of himself, but truly his way of communicating his feelings of pain, difference and suffering in his life.