Jean-Michel Basquiat and jazz made the perfect combination

It has taken more than 30 years, an entire generation, for the world to catch up with the vibrant and troubled artwork of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Far from the disdain it prompted in the early days after his death in 1988, when more than one major museum turned down gifts of his paintings from collectors (one institution allegedly told a donor that the works were not worth the cost of storage), Basquiat’s arrival in the pantheon is now complete.

Not only are some of his pieces among the most valuable in art history (an untitled “skull” painting broke into the elite $100mn-plus sale bracket at a Sotheby’s auction in 2017), but exhibitions devoted to his art are growing in depth and authority, notwithstanding the difficulty of borrowing works that are mostly in private hands.

One of these is Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music, just opened at Montreal’s Museum of Fine Arts, which attempts to trace the importance and influence of music on the painter’s work. This, perhaps more than with any other contemporary artist, is a thematic link whose exploration bears rich dividends. Basquiat’s work is full of references, some coded, others more explicit, to the music he absorbed while working in the febrile cultural surrounds of downtown New York in the late 1970s and 1980s.

“It was a belle époque,” says Michael Holman, a friend of Basquiat who formed the experimental noise band Gray with the artist. “Just like Paris in the 1920s and London in the 1960s.”

Basquiat, of Haitian and Puerto Rican parentage, left home when he was a teenager and was already steeped in the city’s cultural eclecticism. He was present at the age of 17, for example, at a three-day convention in 1978 honouring the writer William S Burroughs, which featured performances by Laurie Anderson, Blondie, John Cage, Philip Glass and Patti Smith.

“But it wasn’t just a downtown art scene,” stresses Holman. “We had something that Paris and London didn’t have, and that was hip-hop: urban, black and Puerto Rican outsiders from the Bronx, saying, ‘Yo! We are doing something here too!’ That added gasoline to the fire.”

It was at the Canal Zone party of April 1979 for New York’s creative set that Holman met Basquiat, who immediately proposed that the two of them form a band. “It was a call, like a Batman signal, that said, ‘If you want to express yourself in a new way, come to New York!’ We could afford to live there on nothing, there was very little police activity, we could do what we wanted. It wasn’t a money grab, it was an art grab. But we were also prepared to roll up our sleeves and say, ‘Let’s make a scene!’”

Basquiat’s ambitions were palpable and serious, says Holman. He left Gray within months to become a full-time solo visual artist. “But there was a time when he thought [the band] was going to be his vehicle for stardom. Now, can you imagine thinking that a band that ripped masking tape off drum heads and played guitars with a metal file on the floor could make you a superstar? He was a little delusional and naive. But he went for it.”

Once fully engaged with his solo work, Basquiat was far from the primitive ingénue that many misguided, and borderline racist, early accounts suggested. “He understood his art history only too well, he knew about Twombly and Dubuffet, he knew what Picasso had done and he knew he had to make some choices. And then he was black, and came loaded with all that baggage. What did that make him? A superhero. And his superpower, his most profound one, was his sensitivity. And that gives you something like a crystal ball. He knew he wasn’t going to live long.”

If it was New York’s cultural scene of his youth, in which music played such a prominent role, that helped propel Basquiat’s artistic output, it was another kind of music altogether that fired the imagination behind some of his most famous paintings. The young artist adored jazz and found inspiration in the darkness and abiding sadness of the lives of some of its most distinguished protagonists.

“There are so many levels in which you can read or hear the music in his work,” says the exhibition’s co-curator, Mary-Dailey Desmarais. “Sometimes he is simply citing favourite musicians, but we also wanted to show how music influenced his own compositional technique.”

Many of the works assembled in the show are littered with mini-portraits of jazz legends and song titles. But Basquiat’s allusions are often more opaque: in “Kokosolo” (1983), for example, named after a work by his hero Charlie Parker, the artist repeats a series of symbols and motifs in the style of a jazz chord chart, washed in an acid yellow that is meant to recall the virtuoso flights of Parker’s alto saxophone. “It is like he is saying, ‘This is my own visual jazz’,” says Desmarais.

Parker is frequently used by Basquiat as a symbol of excellence and, more particularly, black excellence. But the presence of the musician in the paintings denotes many other things too: tragedy (implied by references to Parker’s daughter Pree, who died of pneumonia); exploitation; and suffering for art. “It is clear that Basquiat really admires [Parker] but also feels a great affinity with him,” Desmarais says.

The collaged drawing “Untitled (All Stars)” (1983) is a prime example of the subtlety and free-associating improvisation in Basquiat’s music-based paintings. Scribbled are the names “All Stars” (Parker’s band) and “Max Roach” (the band’s drummer); they are counterpointed by references to the white actors who played the black American radio sitcom characters in the 1950s, Amos ’n’ Andy. Tucked in the bottom right-hand corner is US president Andrew Jackson, a notorious slave-owning anti-abolitionist.

“He is staging a kind of dialogue between authentic black performers and these caricatural portrayals of black people. And then he photocopies the drawing and puts it in [another painting], ‘Toxic’. He is linking that to the history of hip-hop. It is kind of mind-blowing when you look deeply into it.”

Holman believes that the confluence of cultural activities that surrounded Basquiat, who died of a heroin overdose at 27, as he made his restless way into the art world, was a key influence on the direction that he took. “Once he realised he was this superhero who could bend metal, and other people who were smarter than us told him so, he was on his way.

“Without them, he wouldn’t have made it. I don’t think he would have had the fortitude to deal with the microaggressions of racism that were in New York at the time. Without the joy of that scene, the socialising, the support, he just wouldn’t have been able to exist.”

‘Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music’ runs at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, until February 19, mbam.qc.ca. It then travels to Paris as ‘Basquiat Soundtracks’, April 6-July 30, philharmoniedeparis.fr

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