Jean-Michel Basquiat's sisters talk brother's new exhibit, struggles with fame and fraught friendship with Warhol: 'The world wasn't ready for a Black man with dreadlocks who had his kind of talent'
Curating the ‘King Pleasure’ exhibit, featuring more than 200 works by the artist who died in 1988 at age 27, "did not come easily," but it brought the Basquiat family much-needed closure.
Legendary artist Jean-Michel Basquiat was only 27 years old when he died of a heroin overdose in 1988, and his career didn’t really take off until 1982. But during his brief and brilliant life, he became a darling of the New York scene. He sold his first painting, Cadillac Moon, to Debbie Harry, and appeared in two Blondie music videos, “Rapture” and “Atomic.” He designed the Michael Todd VIP Room for NYC’s Palladium nightclub. He dated Madonna when she was on the cusp of fame herself — telling people, “You're going to hear a lot about her soon” — and formed a noise-rock band, Test Pattern, whose members included Vincent Gallo. Among his many other famous friends were Grace Jones, Iggy Pop, Keith Haring, and notably his art hero, Andy Warhol — the latter friendship transforming his life and, in some ways, contributing to its end.
However, to the artist’s younger sisters, Lisane and Jeanine, “He was just Jean-Michel.”
Lisane and Jeanine are sitting with Yahoo Entertainment at the Grand LA in downtown Los Angeles, the site of Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure — an exhibit they curated that features more than 200 of their brother’s never/rarely seen works, as well as recreations of his Great Jones Street studio, the Basquiat family’s Brooklyn home, and the Palladium’s VIP room. “It's been a cathartic process, for sure,” Lisane, who was just 23 when her brother died, says of the project, which involved unarchiving some artifacts that had been in storage for three decades. “It was important that we had a chance to process at a deeper level, because it takes forever to really process someone's death.”
Interestingly, the launch of King Pleasure coincides with another exhibit opening the following week in Paris, Basquiat x Warhol: Paintings Four Hands, and a recent Broadway play starring Jeremy Pope and Paul Bettany, The Collaboration, both of which focus on the bond between Factory pop-art pioneer Andy Warhol and the young artist. (The artists’ relationship was previously examined in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 biopic Basquiat, starring Jeffrey Wright as Jean-Michel and David Bowie as Andy Warhol.) According to legend, the two artists first met in 1979 when an enterprising Basquiat tried to sell Warhol some of his postcards, then became dear friends in ‘82 after being formally introduced by art dealer Bruno Bischofberger. Discussing Jean-Michel’s struggles with fame, particularly at the end of his life, the Basquiat sisters reflect on how the two artists’ intense friendship — and their much-hyped but ill-fated and misunderstood collaboration — affected their sensitive brother.
“I think the [young] age that Jean-Michel was at, at the time of the incredible celebrity and success that he was experiencing… in a lot of ways, he went from really trying to navigate and figure this world out to thrusting himself into it,” muses Lisane. “And I think Andy was someone with whom he could build rapport, because they understood each other's journey.”
“Andy understood where he was going, and was someone that he could bounce ideas off of. And Jean-Michel got Andy to paint again; Andy had not painted in a long time [25 years]. They were both inspirational to each other, and it was a great friendship,” says Jeanine.
When Warhol died unexpectedly in 1987 due to complications from gallbladder surgery, Lisane says Jean-Michel “grieved the loss of Andy and the loss of that friendship. I know that was a very dark time for him, as it is for a lot of men at that age. [Late twenties] is kind of a common age for men to feel some depression. He lost Andy, and he had been in his career for a while, and there was a lot going on. I think he absolutely felt emotionally overwhelmed.” But Jeanine notes that “the bad reviews that [Andy and Jean-Michel] had received for their collaboration” also contributed to their brother’s fragile emotional state.
“It was not well-received by lot of people,” says Jeanine, referring to the roughly 160 works that Warhol and Basquiat did together in the mid-‘80s at which had been Bischofberger’s urging. “There was one critic that actually came out and was very critical of it, and that had Jean-Michel wanting to step away from the art world. Unfortunately, he stepped away from Andy as well. And then to hear of his death — he took that really, really hard.”
“There was an expectation that the collaboration would be received well. And then it wasn't,” Lisane says. “It wasn’t a falling out, per se. … But these were two very creative men who were very passionate. You know, for artists, everything is about their work. And so, when it wasn't received well, it was almost as if they went to their respective corners to kind of contemplate it. And then, before they could actually have a conversation about it or figure out how to move forward from it, Andy passed away, suddenly.”
“Perhaps the world just wasn't ready to see a collaboration show between these two artists,” says Jeanine.
“There was also a lot of scandal and gossip around it,” Lisane adds. “You know, this was Andy Warhol ‘coming out of hibernation’ with this new artist. So, it was more about them than it was about the actual works themselves. I think there was a lot of conversation about their role in the creation than about the actual works. Jean-Michel was also really struggling with journalists and the conversations he was having with them.”
The Basquiat sisters say the press generally mistreated or at least misunderstood their brother, which also caused him a great deal of stress. “The focus was always on him being a Black man. I think the world wasn't ready for a Black man with dreadlocks who had his kind of talent, and he felt very judged and categorized by a lot of the journalists that he was in conversations with,” Lisane says. “This [Warhol collaboration backlash] all happened in the middle of those conversations, so to also have negative feedback on this collaboration was, I think, tough for him.
“You could tell in his interviews there was that bit of tension, when he pushed back on certain areas because he felt disrespected by the questions that were being asked of him,” Lisane elaborates. “Like, ‘How did you learn this? Is this like, primitive?’ Just really, really insulting and inappropriate questions. Or like, I saw this interview on YouTube recently, a call-in show with a bunch of [other artists], and the person on the phone was like, ‘Why do you have this Black guy in the room with you?’ And so you have this really young man at the start of his career, like age 20, and he’s this amazing painter and he knows that about himself… and instead of people focusing on his work, they were very focused on things like his hair, or they made assumptions that he was this kid who came from the streets. And so, while he was navigating his career, he was also navigating the perceptions that people had about him — about who he was and the man that he was.”
Of course, over the decades, the art world that once “othered” Jean-Michel Basquiat has finally caught up with his genius - hence the excitement surrounding the L.A. debut of Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure — and his sisters believe if he’d “had a few more years to navigate it and figure it out and work through some things, we could be having a very different conversation today.” They even suspect that if he had lived, he’d likely be expressing his creativity today as a renowned filmmaker, not as a painter.
“I don't know if we would've seen him continuing to paint at the speed that he was; he probably be doing it more for his own Zen,” says Lisane. “I think Jean-Michel painted because that's what he had in him. … I think he needed to get all of this out, because he mentioned a few times people who had died early. He never said those exact words — like, ‘I think I'm going to die early too’ — but he kind of alluded to it, in a way. I think he knew, on some level, that he was going to pass away young.”
Jeanine and Lisane admit that their decision to oversee King Pleasure “did not come easily,” but Jeanine, who was seven years younger than Jean-Michel, agrees with her older sister that the exhibit has brought them much-needed closure. “During the process, we had a conversation about the night he passed away — myself, Lisane, and our stepmother — with all of our different perspectives of that evening,” she recalls. “We got to really, really speak about that night. Going through a lot of the ephemera and notes and works that we hadn't even seen ourselves in person brought a myriad of emotions. We laughed a lot, but there were moments that were tearful. I think it got a lot out, definitely for myself.”
And how would Jean-Michel feel about this exhibit, and about his overall legacy 35 years after his untimely death? “I think that he'd be happy,” Lisane says with a smile. “He wanted to be famous. He wanted to be well-known. He had a lot to say. I think he'd be really happy about the stamp that he's put on his name.”
Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure runs March 31 through July 31 at the Grand LA. Below, check out his sisters’ curated companion Spotify playlists, which form the chronological soundtrack to the artist’s life:
Childhood / Studio / Legacy / Nightlife
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