jean-michel basquiat returns to the east village

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s signature visual style bounces off the walls in over 60 of the artist’s works now on view at The Brant Foundation in New York City. Created in collaboration with Bernard Arnault and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, where a previous iteration of the exhibition was mounted in late 2018, the Brant show marks Basquiat’s return to his former stomping grounds of Manhattan’s East Village.

Photo: Tom Powel Imaging, Copyright Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Courtesy The Brant Foundation

The self-titled exhibition, the first in the Brant Foundation’s new, 7000-square-foot, four-story venue, offers a survey of the artist’s brief but spectacular career. Works on paper, canvas, wood, wood slats, and a door with glass windows, are all installed within a massive warehouse style space, across small alcoves, and underneath dappled light from a skylight covered by a rooftop reflecting pool. And when viewed in totality, Basquiat’s visual vocabulary seems to push back against the century-old building’s elegant industrial renovation.

Photo: Tom Powel Imaging, Copyright Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Courtesy The Brant Foundation

The show tells the artist’s entire story, from local graffiti origins to recent auction-house headlines. There are familiar works such as the head painting, Untitled (1981) and Hollywood Africans (1983); a suite of 19”x24” oilstick head drawings; a floor-to-ceiling, salon-style installation of stretcher bar paintings (1982-1983) appears in New York for the first time; and there’s one of Basquiat’s last paintings, Unbreakable (1987), that will certainly dazzle fans and aficionados. In contrast, a few works that isolate text in white oilstick against a one color background — Cassius Clay (1982) or Untitled (Sugar Ray Robinson) (1982) — keenly distill Basquiat’s penchant for a communication style akin to cerebral jujitsu.

Photo: Tom Powel Imaging, Copyright Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Courtesy The Brant Foundation

To some extent, the works transference from the street to the constrained habitat of the art world’s upper echelons is an undercurrent in the ambiance of the exhibition. However, for those with a personal relationship to the Black cultures that gave birth to Basquiat, the life force infused in the gestures, marks, text and color of each work feels that much more potent when presented in the context of Loisaida. The racial dynamics, ambition, socioeconomics, music, community, drugs, ennui and general effervescent energy of a particular 1980s moment is unmistakable, and still utterly relevant.

Photo: Tom Powel Imaging, Copyright Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Courtesy The Brant Foundation

The Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition at the The Brant Foundation’s New York space is on view through May 15th.