Works in Black and White (review)

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Pegasus, 1987 (Acrylic, pencil, colored pencil on paper on canvasPrivate Collection. © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Courtesy of Robert Miller Gallery, JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT WORKS IN BLACK AND WHITE ROBERT M I L L E R G A L L E R Y November-January 6, 1994 It's been seven years now since Jean-Michel Basquiat's death. While alive, Basquiat was, indisputably , a hot young thing—he ran hard, pushed himself to his natural limit, surfed the art world social circuit like he was born to it (he was), and cranked out more work than seems possible for one so young. That Basquiat had, in all likelihood, plenty of fun during his brief life appears to be a greater affront to his detractors than the simple fact that he •88" x 90"). NYC. conducted his artistic development with a passion and vision to match Picasso's and da Vinci's. And, like his lauded precursors from the Renaissance as well as in modernism and postmodernism, his work just looks better and better as the temporal gap between his reality and his reputation widens. Of course, nothing builds a reputation quite like death. But to cast Basquiat's career strictly in the terms of a bright light that burned too intensely with a gemlike flame does a tremendous disservice both to his talent and to the force of his art. Peter Schjeldahl had it right when he pointed out that Journal of Contemporary African Art • Spring/Summer 1995 Tom Otterness, Fallen Dreamer and Installation of Primary Human, 1995 (Plaster and watercolor). Courtesy of Skoto Gallery, NYC. PHOTO Spencer Richards Basquiat would have had to strive mightily to make a boring mark. Basquiat certainly made a dull mark or two; between the lively graffiti of the late 1970s and early 1980s, there appears a gulf in the quality of his output that he didn't cross until sometime around 1984, when his art acquired the edge that would have to satisfy his emerging maturity. It would have to satisfy because he only had four years left. But so what? Brice Marden took a long time to grow up, too. Picasso didn 't figure out how to change the face of modern art until he started hanging out with Braque. The show of Basquiat's "Works in Black and White" (although only about half the pieces really fit that billing) at Robert Miller represented a careful precis of the artist's evolving imagination. John Cheim, the exhibition 's organizer, clearly knows his stuff when it comes to making solid decisions about which works to select and how to hang them. From the astounding "Anatomy" series, which dominated the gallery's first room, to the roughly framed paintings from the early 1980s, and culminating with one of Basquiat's greatest pictures, the astonishing "Untitled (Subject)," (1982) everything,about this show consumed, confronted, delighted, amused, and engaged. I love hanging out in galleries, but it's rare that I don't at some point opt for fight over flight. But walking out of this show made me melancholy beyond measure, a feeling I haven't had since Joan Mitchell's recent summer show at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Two paintings, besides "Untitled (Subject)" stood out like beacons: "Pegasus," (1987) an enormous work covered from top to bottom with Basquiat's unique, biocky lettering and a gaggle of small, internally referential images, but with the top seventh or so of the piece obscured a thick fringe of black; and "Calcium 6," (1988) a better painting than Cy Twombly has even toyed with producing since the 1960s. "Calcium 6" shares with Twombly's best work ("Leda and the Swan," for instance) the quality that some paintings have of inhaling their viewers, obliterating in the process any notion of distance or connisseurship. Visible across the painting 's washy, pale surface are such elements as partially and fully obscured text, a cluster of headless figures who appear to be conferring in a huddle, a high-school science book rendering of an atom, and, added with a "touch" that almost defines the creaky formalist definition of "feathery," shoe prints. In a painting...