Basquiat Jean-Michel - Basquiat: a Quick Killing in Art

Basquiat

A Quick Killing in Art

Phoebe Hoban

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

OVERDOSING ON ART

If you had only twenty-four hours left to live, what would you do? I dont know. Id go hang out with my mother and my girlfriend, I guess.

video interview,

Tamra Davis and Becky Johnston, 1986

Friday, August 12, 1988. On the sidewalk outside 57 Great Jones Street, the usual sad lineup of crack addicts slept in the burning sun. Inside the two-story brick building, Jean-Michel Basquiat was asleep in his huge bed, bathed in blue television light. The air conditioner was broken and the room felt like a microwave oven. The bathroom door was ajar, revealing a glimpse of a black and tan Jacuzzi tub. On the ledge of the tub was a small pile of bloody syringes. There was a jagged hole punched in the bathroom window. Beneath it was scrawled the legend Broken Heart, with Basquiats favorite punctuation, a copyright sign.

Kelle Inman, Basquiats twenty-two-year-old girlfriend, was downstairs writing in the journal that Basquiat had given her. He usually slept all day, but when he still hadnt come down for breakfast by midafternoon, Inman got worried. When she looked into the bedroom to check up on him, the heat hit her full in the face, like a wave. But Basquiat seemed to be sleeping peacefully, so she went back downstairs. She and the housekeeper heard what sounded like loud snores, but thought nothing of it.

A few hours later, Basquiats friend Kevin Bray called. He and Basquiat and another friend, Victor Littlejohn, were supposed to go to a Run-D.M.C. concert that evening, and he wanted to make plans with Jean-Michel. Kelle climbed back up the stairs to give Basquiat the message. This time, she found him stretched on the floor, his head cradled on his arm like a childs, a small pool of vomit forming near his chin.

Inman panicked. She had never seen anyone die, although Basquiats drug binges had made the scenario a constant fear. Now it seemed like the worst had happened. She ran to the phone and called Bray, Littlejohn, and Vrej Baghoomian, Basquiats last art dealer.

When I got there, recalls Bray, Kelle said she had called an ambulance. She took me upstairs. Jean-Michel looked like he was comfortably out cold. He was on the floor, lying against the wall, as if he had fallen down and didnt have the strength to get up, and was just taking a nap. There was a lot of clear liquid coming out of his mouth. We picked him up and turned him over. We shook him, and we just kept trying to revive him. It took a long time for the ambulance to arrive. But for a while, after the guys from the Emergency Medical Service came, we thought he was going to be okay. They were giving him shocks and IV treatment. Victor had to hold Jean-Michel up like this so the IVs would drain, says Bray, stretching his arms out in a cruciform.

Bray couldnt take it anymore. He went downstairs, where Inman, and two assistants from the Baghoomian gallery, Vera Calloway and Helen Traversi, were trying to stay calm. We tried to take his pulse. His skin was so hot, says Calloway. Baghoomian called the studio just as the paramedics arrived. He was in San Francisco and Helen was forced to act in his stead.

It was almost like it was some sort of business transaction, says Bray. They put a tube in his throat and they brought him downstairs. They wouldnt tell us whether he was dead or alive and they took him outside. He had this beautiful bubbling red-white foam coming out of his mouth.

We all hoped some miracle would happen, recalls Helen, who begins to cry at the memory. Outside on the pavement, a small crowd had gathered in horror and fascination. I was about to leave on vacation with my wife, says filmmaker Amos Poe, who was a friend of the artist. We watched as they loaded his body into the ambulance. I saw his father pull up in a Saab. I kept saying to my wife, Jean-Michel is dead. He really lived out that whole destructo legend: Die young, leave a beautiful corpse.

At Cabrini Medical Center, Basquiat was pronounced dead on arrival. The cause, according to the medical examiners death certificate, would be determined pending chemical examination. A later autopsy report stated that Basquiat had died from acute mixed drug intoxication (opiates-cocaine). In the months before his death, Basquiat claimed he was doing up to a hundred bags of heroin a day.

Basquiat was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn five days later. His father invited only a few of the artists friends to the closed-casket funeral at Frank Campbells; they were outnumbered by the phalanx of art dealers. The heat wave had broken, and it rained on the group gathered at the cemetery to bid Jean-Michel goodbye. The eulogy was delivered by Citibank art consultant Jeffrey Deitch, lending the moment an unintentionally ironic tone.

Blanca Martinez, Basquiats housekeeper, was struck by the alienated attitude of the mourners. They were all standing separately, as if it were an obligation, she says. They didnt seem to care. Some looked ashamed. People began to leave the cemetery before the body was buried. Ignoring the objections of the gravediggers, Martinez tearfully threw a handful of dirt onto the coffin as they lowered it into the grave.

Basquiats mother, Matilde, looking dazed, approached Baghoomian to thank him for his help to her son during his last days. Gerard Basquiat later admonished his former wife not to talk to the art dealer. The scene was already being set for a bitter battle over the estate of the artist.

The following week, appraisers from Christies set to work taking inventory of the contents of the Great Jones Street loft: finished and unfinished paintings, other artists works (including several dozen Warhols and a piece by William Burroughs), a vintage collection of Mission furniture, a closet full of Armani and Comme des Garons suits, a library of over a thousand videotapes, hundreds of audiocassettes, art books, a carton of the Charlie Parker biography Bird Lives!, several bicycles, a number of antique toys, an Everlast punching bag, six music synthesizers, some African instruments, an Erector set, and a pair of handcuffs.

There were also a number of paintings in warehouses: following Andy Warhols advice, Basquiat had tried to squirrel some of his work away from his ever-eager art dealers. According to Christies, Basquiat had left 917 drawings, 25 sketchbooks, 85 prints, and 171 paintings.

Artist Dan Asher walked by his old friends loft and was astonished to see a number of Basquiats favorite things in a Dumpster: his shoes, his jazz collection, a peculiar lamp made out of driftwood, Sam Peckinpahs directors chair. Asher salvaged a few items; he sold the chair to a collector.

It would be another year before Gerard Basquiat ordered a tombstone for his son. But for several weeks after the artists death, he was commemorated by a small shrine some anonymous fan had placed by his door. Shrouded in lace, it held flowers, votive candles, a picture of Basquiat, some carefully copied prayers, and a Xerox of a David Levine caricature of the artist, complete with a caption: In an age of limitless options and limiting fears, he still makes poems and paintings to evoke his world.

A formal memorial service was finally held at Saint Peters Church in Citicorp Center, on a stormy Saturday in November. Despite the rain, wind, and bleak gray sky, several hundred people crowded into the church. Behind the pulpit hung a portrait of the artist as a young man, superimposed on one of his faux-primitive paintings. One by one, his former friends and lovers remembered Basquiat.