Jean-Michel Basquiat: Street Energy to High Art

Jean-Michel Basquiat died stark naked on the floor of his SoHo loft, his body stretched next to his final heroin syringe. Aged 27, the man whose art had come to brand the counterculture had breathed his last. Basquiat’s death, untimely yet expected, had come to parallel the culture he had defined.

Robert Farris Thompson, perhaps the country’s most prominent scholar of African and African American art, described the art of Basquiat as “transforming the street energy into high art”. Indeed, no one was able to accomplish this transformation better than Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Basquiat experienced street energy and life first hand in his life as a young adult. At the age of 17, he moved to the lower east side of New York, then a hotbed of the counterculture. He once told a reporter about his beginning there, “I thought I was going to be a bum my whole life”. He was a frequenter of clubs, a nightly visitor in fact, whose dancing captivated his peers equally as much as his persona. In that lower east side, hundreds of artists, musicians, and performers lived in a community of creativity. Basquiat arose from this community, his talent and style as distinctive as the man himself.

Along with another artist, Al Diaz, Basquiat began his art career in a graffiti group called "SAMO", and the two artists sprayed phrases and tags across the city. The paint became famous; it earned columns in magazines and newspapers, and left the world bewildered as to who "SAMO" was. Eventually, the young artist revealed his identity and the graffiti group soon after ended its work. Basquiat had finally gone out on his own. He began to paint postcards, and these became the first public viewing of his work.

These cards came to embody the spontaneous and erratic quality of Basquiat's work. Post cards befit his art, because they are fleeting, a simple acknowledgement and remembrance amidst a larger context. The graffiti quality, residual and originating from SAMO, creates the counter-cultural aura and the quality of youthful creativity. His art took the street culture and dripped it onto a canvas.

Basquiat’s art is defined by this abstract style and includes his identifiable style of words on the canvas. Thompson once described Basquiat as “dripping with letters”. These letters play an important role in the art. One example would be in the painting “The Horn Players”. Charlie Parker is depicted aside the word “ornithology” a reference to his song “ornithology” as well as his nickname “bird”; ornithology being the study of birds.

"The Horn Players", aside from its wit with words, presents in Parker an allegory for Basquiat. He is fittingly placed in this picture, because much akin to Basquiat, Parker was more than just an entertainer. He was an icon in the hipster community, an intellectual and revolutionary in a form of art in which the African Americans had pioneered. Art is reflective of the culture that created it, and that when a culture is produces its own art, it tags success and uniqueness on the wall of history. Charlie Parker had raised his street energy of jazz to high art, and in doing so inspired so many African American artists.

The hip hop movement itself was a culture of rebellion in the inner cities, marked by the art and artists of African heritage along with rampant drug usage. Basquiat’s unique artwork came to define the movement and the era, broadcasting his values, those very values which were soon themselves overtaken by the cancer of drug usage in alarming parallel to the era itself.