Basquiat (2010)

Directed by: Jean-Michel Vecchiet | 52 minutes | documentary

Typing Jean-Michel Basquiat as a painter at most tells half the story: in fact, the young man from New York was just a rock star. By the age of fifteen, he was an underground acquaintance with his graffiti art – using more felt-tip pens than the traditional aerosols – before becoming a very successful and well-earning painter within a few years as a painter. He got into drugs, which ended with an overdose in his 27th year of life. That sounds more like Jim Morrison than Jackson Pollock.

The challenge of ‘Basquiat’ is to turn his relatively short period in the spotlight into a convincing documentary, with hopefully enough source material for a feature film. Fortunately, during his adult years, the artist was an explosive lump of creativity, which was expressed in countless ways. So he started as a street artist and as the leader of an avant garde jazz collective, with which he already attracted the necessary attention and was allowed to decorate several television shows. As a painter, he was a compulsive workaholic, sure to fill a handful of exhibitions a year with his work. As an African American, very aware of his roots, and that commitment and love for Africa was reflected in his work. He was also very quick-tempered and impulsive, which caused quite a stir in his private and love life, and his excessive drug use made him increasingly paranoid. Like the prematurely deceased rock musicians of the 1960s, his life was short, but his adult years were very intense. It was not for nothing that he resembled what would later turn out to be the end of his life, a man in his forties, the film notes.

In addition to an at times fascinating insight into this tumultuous life, ‘Basquiat’ is also a portrait of New York in the first half of the 1980s. As a youngster from the slums of the city, he has experienced all the extremes that can be seen in The Big Apple: in the slums he lived in the midst of decay, poverty and above all the enormous drug problem – crack and AIDS destroyed lives. He himself was soon able to move into a more artistic milieu, in which he had a brief affair with a young Madonna and sold his first painting to Debbie Harry, the famous Blondie singer. He eventually became a celebrity himself, teaming up with Andy Warhol and his work being incorporated into the Wall Street jet set, the cocaine and decadence-infested upper class who were bonkers and treated the painter’s work as both a status symbol and investment that will only increase in value. Especially after Basquiat’s sudden death from a heroin overdose.

It’s a fascinating rise and fall, but there’s something wrong with ‘Basquiat’. The scarcity of material of the painter himself soon takes its revenge; even at 52 minutes, the documentary feels on the long side. Furthermore, the film is at times a bit sloppy: the voice-over by a mediocre English-speaking Frenchman is a kind of cross between that of Werner Herzog and the Pink Panther, and tends to be annoying. The choice of music is also a bit lax, with some bland fragments that recur over and over again. The most interesting footage, a short 8mm film that a peer of Basquiat made of him at the age of 15, is shown in part for a while, but should have been included in its entirety because of its promising character. Now with ‘Basquiat’ there remains a good introduction to the life and work of the painter, but the idea arises that the definitive document on Jean-Michel Basquiat is still in the offing.