Basquiat - Boom For Real, exhibition review: The superstar who scrawled to the top

Basquiat: Boom for Real at the Barbican is great if you like paintings. It’s also informative about its subject’s life but perhaps too much so. Born in Brooklyn in 1960 to middle-class parents, Jean-Michel Basquiat became a celebrated artist when he was barely 20. Within a couple of years he regularly earned hundreds of thousands of dollars from work believed by collectors to be startlingly original. They were right. He had a facility for making marks dramatic, and whether sloshed, scrawled, stabbed or whacked, weaving from them a dramatic image. It would be hard to say if the results were really either pictures or abstracts. Maybe they were a new form of picture writing.

If the show isn’t quite a five-star event it’s the fault of the organisers’ heavy-handed approach to context. Music was important to Basquiat. So we hear his favourite jazz all the time, plus the avant-garde music he made with his band, Gray, and on top of that the soundtracks of TV shows and documentaries he occasionally appeared in. Plus you’re being told what to think by often daft wall label explanations (“A bebop cubist pop art cartoon gospel…”).

If the contextual information is out of control its essentials are certainly compelling. Basquiat died young, he was sensitive and humorous, and to a great extent invented a whole culture of himself. He wasn’t an uneducated graffiti artist who got lucky. As a teenager he used graffiti to present himself as a new talent to the art-world and at the same time criticise its nonsense.

One slogan he sprayed on pavements and walls, in the downtown art area of New York, skewered artistic social climbers who are only “playing at art with the radical chic set on daddy’s funds.” Another was against art’s verbosity: its “blah blah and quasi-blah.” Yet another declared himself as a form of “neo art”. Typical street graffiti doesn’t feature words such as “quasi” and “neo”. Basquiat was smart.

The chat about post-punk clubs and underground art scenes in New York, which the show pumps into your head, has no sense of a wise overview. Sometimes it is journalistic blather and other times faux connoisseurship: Basquiat’s work in total is said in the catalogue to be “exquisite”, as if it were products on velvet cushions.

If Charles Darwin appears in a drawing it seems a bit off for the wall label beside it to explain, as if to children, not only who Darwin was — an individual who developed theories on the origin of humans, apparently — but also that Basquiat’s deliberately cartoonish scrawled semblance of him is a “finely executed portrait.”

The catalogue’s first sentence strikes a dud note. “His name has become synonymous with notions of cool”. It’s not very cool to use such strangulated language. If he’s cool, he’s cool. No need to pile on fake intellectualism.

One level of the show is his life story, made uninteresting by curatorial over-management. The other is his work, endlessly rewarding. It shows an artist enthusiastic about different ways of achieving structure and order, often by methods that can seem violently odd. Stretchers have timber struts poking out of every corner and random thread hanging off them. Or instead of a canvas he might paint on a fridge. Not just the door; the whole object.

Anyone sensitive to art will be overwhelmed by Basquiat’s inventive attractiveness. He paints things in, paints them out and then puts them in again differently. You see the visual record of him shuffling all the components. Something arrives ultimately that is wholly fresh. He’s jazzy and garrulous, and surprisingly visually powerful.

A drawing from 1985, Untitled (Estrella), shows a mass of words, from “SUGAR CUBES” to “HOLLYWOOD AFRICANS” as well as the characteristic skull face he often created, using jumpy black lines full of life. It is partly a pseudo-tribal fetish, partly a self-portrait. Every part of the drawing is attended to intensely with a great variety of graphic treatments. There are broad black swift lines, delicate stuttering hatching, light spatters of water-colour and coloured pencil in-fill.

A painting might be nothing but a couple of words: the name of a black sports star. But Basquiat makes it into a monument against racism. A Self Portrait from 1981 is an instantly recognisable likeness. You see it and wonder how he could be so fluent. Flowing, menacing and luminous, it is just black blobs applied swiftly onto splintered panels joined with metal hinges.

Into his art Basquiat fed content he got from books, cereal packets and newspapers, anything that pictured something or had writing on it. Transformed by his mark-making, existing words and phrases flow across canvas or paper like stream-of-consciousness poetry but with surprising graphic crispness. He makes capital-letter writing seem like lively rhythmic patterning.

In May a painting by him sold at a Sotheby’s New York auction for more than $100 million, making Basquiat not only the highest-selling black artist ever but also one of the top five highest-selling artists of all time.

I met him briefly in 1984 in London at the ICA. He supplied some original drawings for an art magazine I edited. I also met Andy Warhol, who befriended him. A portrait of them both by Basquiat, from 1982, is one of the show’s highlights. He created it quickly having met Warhol for the first time that day. His own face is a huge stroke with a house-painting brush of raw sienna. Warhol’s is a slither of pink and white. That evening he sent the painting around to Warhol as a gift.

The great Popist was impressed by Basquiat’s speed. They were to collaborate on 150 works. When I asked Warhol what he got from Basquiat, meaning artistically, he replied irrelevantly but perhaps tellingly: “The smell of grass.” Basquiat took too many drugs. Probably it was his attempt to cope with the demands made on him to live up to a marvellous iconic self he invented, which wasn’t of course real. It was a heroin overdose that killed him in August 1988 at the age of only 27.

Basquiat: Boom for Real is at the Barbican Art Gallery, EC2 (barbican.org.uk) from Thursday until January 28