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How to Look at a Basquiat
It’s not everyday that New York has two Basquiat exhibitions. At “Art and Objecthood,” decoding the basics: his materials, iconography and unmistakable line.It’s not everyday that New Yorkers can choose between two concurrent exhibitions of work by Jean-Michel Basquiat. “King Pleasure,” an immersive experience designed by the architect David Adjaye and curated by the artist’s sisters Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, includes a recreation of Jean-Michel’s childhood bedroom and his studio and charges $35 admission. “Art and Objecthood,” curated by the art historian Dieter Buchhart at Nahmad Contemporary, gathers an extraordinary trove of paintings Basquiat made on doors, windows and a refrigerator.Though “King Pleasure” includes a number of never-before-seen pieces, too, its emphasis is distinctly on the artist’s life, so I’ve focused on the Nahmad show, whose sparse staging give you a better chance of engaging with the work itself. But you should keep his biographical basics in mind.Young and ambitious, Basquiat shot straight into the center of the New York art world when he was barely out of his teens, showing with some of the country’s most influential gallerists, haunting nightclubs with Andy Warhol, and producing a staggering quantity of art work before dying of a heroin overdose, at the age of 27, in 1988. In 2017, one of his paintings sold for more than $110 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by an American artist.He was also the Brooklyn-born son of a Haitian father and Boricua mother, and though his family wasn’t poor, he spent a few lean years on his own before he started selling work. When he did hit the artistic big time, he was one of the few Black faces there — and issues of race and class, complicated by his own extreme experience, are all over his work.Jean-Michel Basquiat’s “Untitled (Refrigerator),” (1981). In the artist’s hands, it wavers between appliance and found surface on which to draw.Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New YorkMaterialsLike most artists, Basquiat drew as a child, famously copying anatomical drawings from “Gray’s Anatomy” while recuperating from a car accident. His first real foray into the adult art world, though, was via the graffiti tag SAMO, which he and his high school friend Al Diaz posted up around SoHo and the School of Visual Arts. Before continuing on to canvas, Basquiat used “found materials” like discarded cardboard and paper or construction debris. In part this was born of necessity — canvas costs money, while broken windows were there for the taking in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s.But Basquiat’s use of found materials was also, as the painted windows, doors and sections of wooden fencing in “Art and Objecthood” make clear, a daring artistic strategy that reverberated through even his more conventional efforts. Unlike ready-mades, the manufactured goods that Marcel Duchamp exhibited as art in the early years of the 20th century, Basquiat’s found objects aren’t exactly sculpture. They’re surfaces for him to paint on. But because they are, also, recognizable objects in their own right, they have a beguiling sort of ambiguity. You can’t quite see “Untitled (Refrigerator)” (1981) as only an appliance, or only a surface to draw on — the longer you look, the more it seems to waver between both categories. And once you’re primed for that sort of ambiguity, you start to see it everywhere. In another context, “Multiflavors” (1982), a royal-blue canvas on exposed wooden stretchers, might just look like a painting. Here, it’s a very peculiar object, too.Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Minor Success” (1980). Pared-down graffiti techniques and pointed assertions of dignity and individuality.Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New YorkIconographyBasquiat didn’t spend long writing graffiti, but he used its techniques throughout his career. The graffiti writer’s pared-down repertoire of easy-to-recognize signs can be as effective on a gallery wall as they are on the side of a building, and one of his favorites — a simple, icon-like crown — shows up on the first piece in “Art and Objecthood,” a white wooden cabinet door titled “Minor Success” (1980). Beneath it are a face without features and a cartoonish sports car.“If you ask 10 people” about the crown, says Buchhart, the curator, “they’ll tell you 10 different meanings.” He goes on to cite Basquiat’s often-quoted remark that his artistic subjects — musicians, athletes, artists — were “royalty, heroism and the streets,” and the way the crown serves to emphasize images or works particularly special to the artist.Essentially, though, the crown claims a figurative mantle of royalty for the artist himself, for the figure he’s depicting, or both — Basquiat’s faces and bodies often read at least partially as self-portraits. But it’s also more nuanced than that, particularly as wielded by a young Black artist intent on making himself a celebrity. You have to ask what kind of social context required him to make such pointed assertions of dignity. Is it one in which Black faces struggle to be recognized as individuals? Or one in which status comes from the possession of material objects like a fancy car?Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Multiflavors” (1982). A painting on canvas demonstrates the unique quality of Basquiat’s writing.Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New YorkWriting/DrawingAnother aspect of graffiti that Basquiat kept hold of was the use of writing for visual effect. In many earlier collages and works on paper, a deluge of all-caps writing fills every available square inch. But you can’t read from beginning to end and expect to find an argument. What you get instead is a cloud of loose associations more similar to a picture, in the way you read it, than to ordinary prose or even poetry.This quality is amplified by the way Basquiat mixes drawing and writing together. If you look back at “Multiflavors,” you’ll find that it has a three-pointed yellow crown in the middle and a cloud of red and yellow circles to one side, and that the white, yellow and pink writing, arranged over blocks of black and blue, forms a striking composition. When you come to read it, you find a group of what appear to be references to advertisements or restaurant signs, phrases like “cheap food” and “HACKED CHICKEN WITH MULTIFLAVORS.” You can’t definitively say whether it’s satire or poetry, angry or exuberant or funny. But it could almost be all of them.CompositionOne thing in particular that’s easier to see in “Art and Objecthood” than in the overwhelming visual cacophony of “King Pleasure” is how conservatively Basquiat organized the elements of his paintings. The sheer profusion of marks can be misleading, but if you recognize the scratches and scrawls of “Minor Success,” for example, as providing a texture rather than so many pieces of separate information, you’ll see that the arrangement of crown, face and car couldn’t be more straightforward. A squat little refrigerator is adorned with a burst of letters and a face in “Untitled (Refrigerator),” but they stop just short of the handle, letting the mostly blank lower section balance their effect. And even when every mark really does carry the same weight, as in an intricately painted yellow door, Basquiat keeps careful control of shape and color to create an overall effect of harmony and stability that balances the frantic energy of his lines.Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Untitled” (1982). His line “shivers like someone naked in a snowstorm.”Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New YorkLineThe most stunning piece in “Art and Objecthood” may be an untitled painting from 1982 — the year the artist himself claimed to have “made the best paintings ever.” Done in acrylic and enamel on a packing blanket mounted on exposed wooden stretchers, it shows a Black face with white features and a blood-red skull marked with little black dashes like watermelon seeds.It’s a searing portrait of the psychic toll of racism: Even as slurs and insulting tropes leave him bloody and exposed, the figure wears a “white” expression to get along. It’s another stately composition, too, balancing a dense figure on one side with empty space on the other and underlining both for emphasis. And it’s as good a place as any to study what may be the single most distinctive feature of Basquiat’s work — his line.The line that describes this skull shivers like someone naked in a snowstorm. It makes a break in the jaw, uneven eyebrows, a bump on the crown of the skull. It doesn’t leave anything unclear; the drawing is as easy to read as a geometric diagram. But this shakiness does transmit extra information. It lends the figure a particular kind of intensity, making the eyes squint and the teeth gnash, and it gives a similar intensity to the art work as a whole, evoking the tension and energy that must have gone into making it. At the same time, it gives you a sense, more vivid than any mere biography, of the personality of the man who drew it — manic and melancholy, electric, incandescent.Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art and ObjecthoodThrough June 11, Nahmad Contemporary, 980 Madison Avenue, third floor, 646-449-9118; nahmadcontemporary.com.— More
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From Graffiti to Gallery, Chris ‘Daze’ Ellis Lays New Tracks
His paintings at the contemporary gallery PPOW are a bridge to his train-tagging days and a paean to Bronx street life.The Tribeca gallery PPOW, where Chris Ellis’s work is on view, sits around the corner from the old Mudd Club space, which in the late 1970s and early ’80s functioned as a clubhouse for New York City’s downtown demimonde. Graffiti writers from uptown and the outer boroughs mixed with art world habitués, and Keith Haring had the run of its fourth floor gallery. It was where Ellis, who began tagging trains as Daze in 1976, first showed his studio work indoors, a piece he made with Jean-Michel Basquiat for the 1981 show “Beyond Words,” curated by Leonard McGurr (a.k.a Futura) and Fred Brathwaite (a.k.a. Fab 5 Freddy).“The Mudd Club was the first place that I ever sold a piece of work,” Ellis said at PPOW recently, his graying curls peeking out from under a knit cap. “This impromptu collaboration with Jean-Michel, where we both tagged up this piece of newsprint, and Rene Ricard bought it. I think I got 50 bucks from that, so I was happy.”Chris “Daze” Ellis, “A Memorial” (2020), in acrylic, oil, spray paint, respirator on canvas.Chris “Daze” Ellis and P·P·O·WThat version of New York — of artistic production abetted by cheap rent and creative permissiveness — can feel very far away. A plaque marks the spot where the Mudd Club stood; there’s a boutique hotel nearby, its sleek lobby lit by designer lamps. Ellis’s exhibition at PPOW, “Give It All You Got,” which is on view until Feb. 12, attempts to create a bridge between that fertile time in the city’s history and its current iteration: richer, pandemic buckled and more atomized. It brings together pieces from Ellis’s 40-year studio practice, and new paintings that are both mournful and exultant. They elegize, in a collision of figurative precision and emotive abstraction, the artist’s friends and contemporaries, many of whom have died, but also a feeling of wonder that has, if not entirely dissipated, been tempered by a lifetime in the city.“A Memorial” (2020), for instance, depicts a train tunnel shrouded in icy blue darkness, a construction of the ones Ellis spent countless hours in. On its walls and the sides of a subway car he’s committed the tags of writers he’s known. For writers, the visual representation of one’s name is sacred currency, and Ellis renders each in the precise style of its originator, an affecting devotional act. They largely represent first and second generation graffiti writers — Dondi, DON1, IZ, NIC 707, Phase 2. “Each one of these guys had their own story to tell,” he said.The tunnel scene rises into a washy field of bright greens and vaporous pinks, as if leaving the earthly plane for something celestial. The canvas is crowned by a serious-looking respirator — Ellis’s own — that hangs over it like a halo. Ellis, 59, was one of the few graffiti writers that used a respirator while using aerosol paint, which in the ’80s could still contain lead. He credits it with saving his life. It’s a memento mori, charging the canvas with the specter of death but also salvation, ideas that for the graffitist go hand in hand; the art at once a source of peril and a lifeline.Chris “Daze” Ellis, “Untitled (City),” (1984), spray paint, acrylic, collage at PPOW.Chris “Daze” Ellis and PPOWHis other recent work continues in this mode: realist, sober depictions of subway stations or the interiors of train cars dissolving into drippy splatter and intense bursts of color. They address Ellis’s split consciousness, his studio practice and his train days. In some, massive letters spelling “DAZE” creep up, interrupting the plane (As with other writers, Ellis’s nom de graf doesn’t hold special significance; he simply chose the letters he was best at rendering.)Along with artists like Futura, Zephyr, John “Crash” Matos, Lee Quiñones, and others, Ellis is one of the surviving members of a clutch of figures that achieved recognition in that era for their innovations in aerosol art, a distinctly American expressionism that prized dexterity and bravado and eventually became a movement with global reach. The careening lines and splashy strokes in Ellis’s latest work are reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism’s muscular gestures, and are a reminder that style writing is a form of action painting).“It very quickly took over my whole life,” Ellis said. Born in Brooklyn, he grew up in Crown Heights and began painting trains in 1976 while enrolled at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan. “I spent a lot of time sketching and drawing and hanging out at train stations for hours waiting to photograph pieces that went by,” he said. “I knew I was creative, I didn’t know that I was calling subway painting art.”Ellis juggles spray paint cans in his Bronx studio in front of “Eastern Parkway” (2016) at left; “Untitled” (2021) in the center, and a cutout from the 1980’s at right.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesBy the early 80s Ellis had transitioned into a studio practice that translated the energy of its moment. “Untitled (City),” from 1984, shows a crowded club scene, a Reginald Marsh-like crush of punks and poets and people simply trying on new personas the way one might a fez, as a figure in a lower corner does.“This would have been the scene in Danceteria or Area, this weird mixture of all these different characters from all levels of society,” he said. “I was a part of that, too.” Nightclubs provided space for experimentation, exhibiting work that established galleries were less keen on. Ellis recalls a night at the Mudd Club when Basquiat pressed a fresh copy of “Beat Bop,” his spacey, panoramic record with Rammellzee and K-Rob, into his hands. Today it’s considered a blueprint of modern hip-hop.“I feel like when you read about the history of what happened then, it looks like these events could have taken place over 20 years, but it was only a few years. Every week something was going on you didn’t want to miss out on.”Chris “Daze” Ellis, “The Explorers” (2021), spray paint, acrylic on canvas.Chris “Daze” Ellis and P·P·O·WMuch of the new work invokes Mr. Ellis’s sons Indigo and Hudson, 9 and 12. They provide the models for two life-size resin sculptures, as well as the figures in “The Explorers” (2021), an expansive painting of a rail yard, a site stitched from Mr. Ellis’s memory, and now marked with homages (off to one side, the front end of Blade’s “Dancin’ Lady” train, an early influence, is visible). The site is both indelibly the Bronx and also not; the yard and trains cast in numinous ultramarine and violet signal that this is a kind of psychic haven. “It’s not that important to me to have a specific representation of a place, it’s more like you recognize it, but not really,” Ellis said. Honeyed light shines from apartment windows.In its desire to present a corrective portrait of a misunderstood place, “The Explorers” has an affinity with an older work, “Reflections in a Golden Eye,” from 1992, also on view, a pastoral toile of daily Bronx street life — the botanica, the mother and child, stoops, the subway — joined by a Rauschenbergian construction of studio flotsam: a mousetrap, a T-shirt silk-screen, a “Danger” sign. “My studio has been in the Bronx for decades now. I always loved being up there. Where there’s a lot of negative connotations about the Bronx, I always saw the positive.”When Ellis began making paintings he wasn’t yet in a studio of his own. He would paint on rooftops or in corners lent by friends. “Reflections in a Golden Eye” is one of the first pieces of art Mr. Ellis made in his own space, and it shows an artist expanding both formally and metaphorically, as well as the ways artists of his generation absorbed diffuse source material into hybridized forms, like cartographers redrawing the shape of the city in real time.Installation view, “Chris Daze Ellis: Give It All You Got,” PPOW, New York.Stan NartenIn recent years there’s been a revived interest in this period of art: the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, exhibition, “Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation,” from 2020; “Beyond the Streets,” in 2019, and “Henry Chalfant: Art vs. Transit, 1977-1987” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts that same year (Ellis’s work figured in both). Work by Futura and Mr. Quiñones has been the subject of recent gallery shows, as has Rammellzee’s oracular oeuvre, which Red Bull Arts surveyed in 2018. Jeffrey Deitch recently announced his representation of Rammellzee’s estate.“At one point I felt that it was being swept under the carpet,” Ellis said. “I like that people are trying to fill in the blanks about what they didn’t know.” He traced this to a combination of nostalgia and clarifying hindsight, but isn’t interested in being lodged in either.“I don’t want to be stuck in a certain era. You can’t recreate a period that no longer exists. The generation that’s coming up now, they will be affected by things like social media, the immediacy of being able to see something right away. It’s not word of mouth anymore, but I believe there is still this community.”Ellis in his Bronx studio with studies for paintings.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesA few months ago, Ellis visited McGurr at his studio in Red Hook after an extended period out of contact. “When I was getting started he was one of the people that let me use his studio to paint,” Ellis said. “We have a shared history. More recently I’ve done some projects with Pink and Crash. We don’t speak to each other everyday, we may see each other once a year,” he said. “But people are still very much evolving.”Chris Daze Ellis: Give It All You GotThrough Feb. 12, PPOW, 392 Broadway, TriBeCa; 212-647-1044; ppowgallery.com. More
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Futura, a King of Graffiti, Returns to His Roots
#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsThe graffiti artist Futura, born Leonard McGurr, near the Eric Firestone Gallery in Manhattan, where “Futura 2020,” his first solo exhibition in New York in 30 years, is on view.Credit…Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesSkip to contentSkip to site indexFutura, a King of Graffiti, Returns to His RootsThe artist has gone from painting subway cars to the runways of Comme des Garçons. After a hiatus, his two exhibitions are his first in his hometown in 30 years.The graffiti artist Futura, born Leonard McGurr, near the Eric Firestone Gallery in Manhattan, where “Futura 2020,” his first solo exhibition in New York in 30 years, is on view.Credit…Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyPublished More
