“Basquiat: King Pleasure” is more about family than anything else. And time, something Jean-Michel Basquiat had very little of. It takes the pharaonic, time-less legend that is the artist Basquiat and reduces him to man, to brother, to son; it returns to him a rooted sense of time and place, a reality of 27 years that, as you move through the exhibition, truly feels like 27 years. He was a child for nearly the entirety of his life – to be confronted with the immaturity of a man known as one of the greatest American artists of all time is striking. It is a story that could only be told by his family. And told by his family it was. Our sense of Basquiat – here, often referred to as Jean-Michel – as a brother is strong. It is his life told through the eyes of his family, particularly through those of his two younger sisters Lisane and Jeanine, who organized the exhibition. If there is anyone who could humanize a legend, it is a little sister.

The exhibition opens into a warm, almost nest-like room lined with dark paneled wood – the first of a suite of physical chambers that will hold those 27 years. The exhibition space, held at the Starrett-Lehigh building, was designed by renowned British-Ghanian architect Sir David Adjaye, who designed the National Museum of African American History and Culture, among many other notable projects. Immediately the visitor is confronted by a bout of layered sounds. In a nod to the important place music held in Basquiat’s life, the exhibition has partnered with Spotify to create four curated playlists: Listen Like Basquiat: Childhood, Studio, Nightlife, and Legacy. They are played simultaneously in the exhibition, yet spaced apart; for example, upon entering one could hear John Lennon’s “Imagine” around the corner in “Childhood” and, farther in the distance, Madonna’s “Everybody” coming from the “Nightlife” room, almost as though you could hear the end of his life when you were just at the beginning.

The first room “1960” is a collection of self-portraits, including a pair of nearly identical portraits, one labeled “1960,” the year he was born; the other simply “Self Portrait” painted when he was 23 – perhaps he too saw himself as an eternal child, physically identical at 23 to the day he was born. A large map of Manhattan and Brooklyn is too featured in this first room: “Jean-Michel’s New York.” This map, outlining the places Jean-Michel grew up and would frequent in his young-adulthood, is the beginning of the contextualization of his life that will follow, rooting his immense, floating legacy in place – the legend becomes non-fiction.

Next is “King’s County.” Past a display of home videos and through an arched hallway lined with drawings from his youth we reach a long glass case that holds sketches from his teenage notebooks. They feel so like the drawings of a 17-year-old New Yorker: there is a “Poem for the Subway” that opens with “rumble rumble rumble” and a cityscape of a figure lifted out by a balloon from a mass of “working class heroes” “upon leaving the ‘norm’.” There are mentions of the television cartoons that inspired him and the voices of his sisters telling stories of jumping off furniture clutching open umbrellas under instruction from their brother who wished to teach them to fly. We are confronted with the boy Jean-Michel, and yet, the very next gallery displays work from the most pivotal points of his career.

Passing recreations of his Brooklyn childhood home, we enter the open space of “World Famous” and “Blue Ribbon,” displaying many works from 1982, a pivotal point of his career and considered by many to be the year he produced his best work. For most of 1982, Jean-Michel was 21 years old. The gallery features, like the rest of the exhibition, never-before-seen or rarely exhibited works; two works painted on wood fencing taken from behind his studio in Venice Beach, a dark square female nude (Venus) on drooping canvas supported by what seem to be wooden wall moldings, and a large glowing marigold yellow painting with a child-like sketch of a monkey at the center stand out. The young artist’s naive desire for fame and recognition – a desire realized likely beyond anything he could have imagined – is centered.

The exhibition continues into Basquiat’s collection of African art and artifacts and “Ideal,” a recreation of his Great Jones Street studio. The Breakfast Club plays on VHS, reference books are strewn across the paint-splattered floor, a bottle of wine and half-filled glasses litter the make-shift plywood table – it feels like the urban, underground studio of a street-turned-canvas Black artist in his mid-20s. Paintings that, today, sell for millions of dollars, are scattered on the ground and stacked against the walls; the reality of the artist – separate from his glamorous legacy – is palpable. Following are galleries “Royalty,” “Irony of Negro Policeman,” and “Those Who Dress Better Can Receive Christ.” They focus on Basquiat’s celebration of his heroes as Black Royalty, critique of police brutality and institutionalized racism, and focus on historic events, especially those critical to Black history, in his work. The extent to which the time and place of his life affected his work is emphasized.

The exhibition closes with “Late Night New York,” a surprisingly wholesome celebration of the late-night downtown New York club scene in the 80s, and Jean-Michel’s affinity for it. A recreation of the Palladium VIP room, the paintings he was commissioned to create for it displayed prominently, closes the exhibition, alongside a stack of screens flicking through iconic nightlife photos of the era. There is no mention of his struggle with addiction nor the heroin overdose that killed him in 1988. His family has instead curated an experience that focuses on the era, people, and places that inspired him, and his identity as a man, a brother, and a son, in addition to his identity as an artistic genius. He is Basquiat the King, but the exhibition is “King Pleasure,” the jazz-vocalist whose 1952 song “Moody’s Mood for Love” closed DJ Frankie Crocker’s radio show each night, airing in Basquiat’s teenage years, and of which Jean-Michel’s father, Gerard Basquiat, was fond. Jean-Michel painted a work by the name in 1987, a simple crown that holds within it his youth, his family, his love for music, and his influence by the Black royalty that came before him.

Article by Sienna Ropert, Contributor, PhotoBook Magazine
Tearsheets by Alexa Dyer, Graphic Design Coordinator, PhotoBook Magazine
*All photos taken by Sienna Ropert

THE BOY KING FROM KING’S COUNTY: “BASQUIAT—KING PLEASURE” REVEALS JEAN-MICHEL