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    How to Look at a Basquiat

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    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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      After Half a Century, White Columns Still Surprises

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      New York’s longest running alternative art space celebrates its own near-mythic history — as well as the twists and turns of the city’s cultural scene.“I’m going to use a word you’re not supposed to say,” the sculptor Jeffrey Lew declared with a touch of bravado. “I’m sort of a sociopath.”In 1969 Lew and Rachel Wood, then his wife, purchased a decrepit six-story rag-salvaging factory in SoHo for $110,000. They moved into its upper floors with an assortment of kindred artists and, with fellow sculptors Gordon Matta-Clark and Alan Saret, turned the unheated ground floor and basement into a 7,400-square-foot exhibition space named 112 Greene Street (and later 112 Workshop), after its location. Subsequent shows featured a wall-mounted piece made of 500 pounds of decaying carrots, massive holes cut into the floor, and a dance troupe swinging overhead from the 17-foot-high ceiling.Installation view of the inaugural group show at White Columns’ first home at 112 Greene Street, Oct. 1970.Cosmo Sarchiapone, via White ColumnsThe Glenn Branca Ensemble performing at White Columns’ “Noise Fest,” June 20, 1981.Terri Slotkin, via White ColumnsThose early ’70s spectacles have since attained near-mythic status; work staged there that Lew felt museums and established galleries either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, show has since been feted in museums and blue-chip galleries. But Lew soon grew tired of the creeping professionalism brought on by a National Endowment for the Arts grant. “When I got the N.E.A. grant they said, ‘Give us your schedule.’ A schedule?” Lew recalled with a laugh. “The minute people start acting like curators, that’s when the good stuff ends.”By late 1978, Lew said he’d had enough of committees and payroll issues. He’d already turned the building’s upper-floor lofts into co-ops, but he was still the art space’s landlord. Citing his hefty tax bill, he tripled its $550 monthly rent, fully aware that its governing board could never afford the new rate. “Like I said, I’m a sociopath,” Lew explained. “I just didn’t have any feelings whether it went under.”Audience at a concert by the Italian folk group Pupi e Fresedde, held in conjunction with a White Columns exhibition of Peter Schumann’s puppets and masks, September 1977. Peter Schumann and White ColumnsYet 112 Greene Street didn’t die. Quite the opposite. It eventually found a new home in the West Village, as well as new leadership. Rechristened White Columns, the nonprofit became not only New York City’s longest running alternative art space, but one of its most enduringly vital. The evidence is on its walls as part of its 50th anniversary exhibition, which Matthew Higgs, the gallery’s director and chief curator since 2004, describes as part celebration and part tribute to the ongoing story of the New York art scene.Poring over the archival installation photos and printed ephemera, what emerges is a dizzying array of artists who began their careers with solo debuts there. From John Currin and Cady Noland in the ’80s to Rachel Feinstein and Glenn Ligon in the ’90s, no one style predominates. The common thread is simply that a given director found an artist interesting enough to present work and offer it for sale with no strings — one of 15 to 20 such shows every year — relying on grants and donations to cover its now approximately $1 million budget.Jeffrey Lew with his installation “Drawerings,” Jan. 25 – Feb. 6, 1975.Jeffrey Lew and White Columns; Cosmo SarchiaponeOne of Lew’s parting gifts may be precisely what allowed White Columns to continue past his brinkmanship. In late 1979, sensing a simpatico spirit, Lew encouraged Josh Baer, then 23 years old, to apply for the space’s vacant director position. Baer had no formal administrative or curatorial experience. But he’d grown up at the heart of the ’70s New York art world — his mother and stepfather were the acclaimed painters Jo Baer and John Wesley. Even more crucially, he was immersed in the new art forms bubbling up downtown. “Everything was blending together,” Baer recalled. “Hip-hop was breaking out, break dancing, graffiti art, noise music. That Gordon Matta-Clark era, that minimalist sculpture thing of SoHo, had now been replaced by a generation that’s more at home at the Mudd Club.”Baer insisted that being chosen to run White Columns in 1979 “wasn’t a glamorous thing to walk into. It was in impossible shape.” Sighing over his own naïveté, from his current perspective as an art adviser, he added, “Only somebody that young would be dumb enough to do it.” Monthly rent may have only been $415 at the space’s next home near the West Side Highway, but that was hardly a well-trafficked art burg. Moreover, the entire year’s budget was a mere $8,000 — with no provision for a director’s salary.From left, the artists Gretchen Bender, Cindy Sherman with Josh Baer, the White Columns director, at a fund-raiser, May 27, 1982.Robin Holland, via White ColumnsThe crowd inside a Danceteria benefit for White Columns, May 27, 1982.Robin Holland, via White ColumnsThe artist and new board member Mike Roddy suggested that Baer rebrand the space as “White Columns,” an architectural nod to the classically styled features of both its old and new addresses. It was also a droll statement about the rigid hierarchy of the art world being 100 percent white, Baer said critically. Hoping the frisson of spotlighting artists of color under the new name wouldn’t be lost on anyone, the updated moniker was made public for a September 1980 show featuring a sprawling subway-style mural by Lee Quiñones and Fred Brathwaite, a.k.a. Fab Five Freddy, one of the first times graffiti had been brought indoors into a prominent gallery setting.“We were both planting our flags in a whole new atmosphere,” Quiñones said recently, speaking of Baer’s invitation to spray-paint White Columns’ interior. Indeed, his show drew a host of downtown luminaries, from the critics Edit DeAk and Rene Ricard to the writer and cable TV host Glenn O’Brien, all of whom in turn helped spark a thorny love affair between the worlds of contemporary art and graffiti which continues to this day. The buzz-laden response also firmly linked White Columns’ new identity with both the nascent East Village art scene and the art market boom as each gathered steam in the ’80s.Lee Quiñones’s and Fred Brathwaite’s Sept. 1980 show at White Columns, one of the first prominent gallery exhibitions of graffiti in New York City.Charlie AhearnThat soaring market — and the ability of a White Columns show to catapult an unknown artist into its midst — could take on almost ridiculous aspects. “The commercial art world is a genius in finding ways to sell things that seem unsellable,” noted Bill Arning, who became director in 1985 and is now a Houston gallerist. At the March 1988 solo debut of Cady Noland’s unsettling installations — including a pair of geriatric walkers slung over a stanchion with a photo of a pistol leaning nearby — Arning said he fruitlessly tried to convince the collectors Don and Mera Rubell to purchase a piece for $400. He said Mera Rubell eventually admitted to him that she’d ended up buying that same piece a year later, once Noland’s career exploded — for $40,000.As the ’80s ended and the market mania collapsed, the resulting tensions rebounded inside White Columns. The painter Marilyn Minter said her 1988 solo debut there resulted in no less than 10 galleries pursuing her. Grateful to the space for plucking her out of semi-obscurity, she joined its board in 1991, happy to put her growing cachet at its service, even as her own sales slowed. “We were lucky to keep the doors open back in the ’90s,” Minter remembered. “Just keeping the air-conditioning on in the summer was a big deal!”Jeff Lewis studying a selection of White Columns publications from the 1990s and early 2000s.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesDespite the ’90s deepening recession, artists continued to see a White Columns show as transformational. “It changed my life completely,” John Currin said of his 1989 debut there, long before his portraits would fetch seven-figure sums at auction. “I made $5,000, that was huge! My entire income for the whole year before was $9,000 slaving away on drywall jobs.” A decade later, his wife, the sculptor Rachel Feinstein, said her own debut quickly moved her from working at the front desk of the Marianne Boesky Gallery to becoming one of its represented artists.Accordingly, Paul Ha, Arning’s successor in 1996 — and current director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, in Cambridge, Mass. — said he learned to set aside his misgivings at having White Columns act as a de facto “talent scout” for commercial galleries. “When you see so many people struggling, you just want to help them with their career,” Ha explained. Some of Esteban Jefferson’s work at his Nov. 2019 solo debut at White Columns.Esteban Jefferson and White Columns; Marc TattiHiggs continued that tradition, with a notable tweak. “When I arrived at White Columns,” he said, “the question for us as an organization was what could we do that would make a difference?” The inclusion of both Black and female artists was finally on the cultural world’s radar. However, “What was strikingly obvious to me was that the work of artists with developmental disabilities was just completely underrepresented in the field of contemporary art. There were these extraordinary organizations like Creative Growth in Oakland or Visionaries + Voices in Cincinnati, supporting extraordinary communities of artists. But they just didn’t have access to the same kind of networks that artists coming out of Yale or Columbia’s M.F.A. programs might.”Enter White Columns. Higgs has presented 25 solo shows of developmentally disabled artists so far, including William Scott, who he notes finally had a work acquired by the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art — 14 years after his debut at White Columns. “Patience is a key factor here,” he quipped.Matthew Higgs, left, and the artist B. Wurtz during the opening of White Columns’ 50th anniversary exhibition.Victor Llorente for The New York TimesYoung art school graduates haven’t been entirely nixed: The painter Esteban Jefferson was an immediate sensation with his 2019 solo debut, an expanded version of his Columbia M.F.A. thesis vividly contrasting a Paris museum’s African statues with the faces of its staffers and their blandly institutional setting. But Higgs has also made a point of spotlighting barely seen older figures, from David Byrd, who drew chilling drawings of the Westchester psychiatric ward where he worked for 30 years until 1988, to Ben Morea, who created abstractions in 1964 before becoming better known as an art world provocateur and political activist. Even other venues have received attention: In 2010, the artist Margaret Lee was asked to put together a retrospective on the raucous, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink group shows she began staging in 2009 at her semi-legal 179 Canal space in Chinatown.Lee said she was pleasantly shocked by her discussions with Higgs as she explored recreating 179 Canal’s chaotic vibe and messy energy within White Columns. “He never said ‘I don’t like the aesthetics of this.’ It was more ‘I’m around if you want to talk, but you’re free. Just be responsible.’” So, echoing the anti-guidelines first offered by Jeffrey Lew on Greene Street decades ago — Do what you want, just don’t burn the place down? “Actually,” Lee recalled wryly, “we did almost burn White Columns down. We wanted to leave a microwave running for 24 hours. Matthew said, ‘No, you cannot do that. You need a fake microwave.’ That’s where he drew the line!”From the Archives: White Columns & 112 Greene Street/112 Workshop — 1970-2021Through July 31 at White Columns, 91 Horatio Street, Manhattan; 212-924-4212; whitecolumns.org. More