Review: A Better Basquiat Show

Jean-Michel Basquiat has been the subject of so many exhibitions you might wonder why we need “Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: The Untold Story,” which just opened at the Guggenheim Museum. The truth: We need it. Compared to the unfocused mega-show held at the Brant Foundation last spring, the Gugg zooms in on a single painting – “The Death of Michael Stewart,” a horizontal, two-foot-wide canvas that is known as “Defacement.” Basquiat painted it 1983, in response to the tragic death of Michael Stewart, a 25-year-old African-American artist who was allegedly tagging a subway wall one September night when he was arrested by transit cops and beaten into a coma. He died soon afterwards.

Judged in purely artistic terms, “Defacement” leaves much to be desired. A thin figure, in black silhouette, occupies the center of the canvas, as two cops – cartoony figures with jagged predator teeth – raise their clubs and prepare to clobber him. Basquiat painted the image on the studio wall of his friend Keith Haring, and it feels like a rough draft, with none of the linear elegance and geometric majesty of his best works. It is not composed so much as dashed off. The tags of other artists (Daze and Zephyr, among them) can be deciphered on the canvas, attesting to the casual and communal spirit in which the work was undertaken.

However incomplete it may feel, “Defacement” is, undeniably a fascinating social artifact. After Basquiat’s own death – of a drug overdose, just five years after he painted “Defacement” – Haring arranged to have the painting cut out of his wall and displayed in a comically ornate gold-leaf frame. This adds to the sense that the painting is not wholly by Basquiat, or rather that it is at least half Haring.

Chaédria Labouvier, a culture writer who curated the show and has described herself as the first African-American to mount a show at the Guggenheim, argues that the painting is a seminal work in which Basquiat articulates his feelings about police brutality. She calls her show “an untold story” because she believes we need to see him in a political context – as opposed to the traditional formalist context of the past, which has celebrated him as a figurative artist who borrowed a bit from such lofty predecessors as Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet and helped inaugurate the Neo-Expressionism of the ‘80s. 

Have we neglected to consider Basquiat’s struggles as a black man, the burden of growing up marginalized? The question seems right for this moment and will no doubt help us to appreciate Basquiat as a key forerunner of today’s identity-focused art.