Basquiat

Starring: Jeffrey Wright, David Bowie, Benicio del Toro, Gary Oldman

Release: 1996

The career of the Neo-expressionist painter Jean-Michel Basquiat is the subject of the film Basquiat, released just seven years after the painter’s death of a heroin overdose. The son of a Puerto Rican mother and Haitian father, Basquiat’s art reflected his ethnic heritage and the New York street scene, incorporating graffiti into his anatomically interested images. The film follows the painter’s uncomfortable journey from homeless street artist to member of the New York art elite.

Basquiat was a part of a circle of artists who incorporated multiple media into their works, and he performed music and DJed, while also selling homemade postcards to support himself early in his career. As the art community started to recognize his unique voice and viewpoint, the film represents him as drifting further away from his friends and musical collaborators, until he is left with very few close relationships. As the film nears its conclusion, Basquiat’s only lasting relationships are with Andy Warhol (played here by David Bowie) and characters played by Benicio del Toro and Gary Oldman.

The Gary Oldman character, “Albert Milo”, is the subject of the most controversial and critical conversation surrounding the film. In reality, there was no Albert Milo, but he does very clearly seem to represent a real figure in Basquiat’s life – Julian Schnabel, a painter who also directed this film. For most critics, this conflict of interests seems to be a definite problem. The Milo character is portrayed as a stalwart and true friend to the genius, encouraging Basquiat in moments of despair. Milo is even represented as the perfect father – father to a daughter played, in fact, by Schnabel’s real life daughter. If you’ve read Giorgio Vasari’s seminal Lives of the Artists, the relationship in the film feels all too familiar. Just as Vasari seems to have inflated himself by presenting his “close” personal relationships with artists like Michelangelo (despite other sources where Michelangelo personally records finding Vasari to be a bit of a pest), critics claim that Schnabel has inflated his own importance in his rendering of Basquiat’s life. When Basquiat’s estate refused to allow any of the artist’s works in the film, Schnabel painted his own original works to feature as Basquiat’s, so in the film, Basquiat’s genius really is presented as Schnabel’s genius.

Despite this questionable aspect of the film, it does present some very strong and intriguing art philosophy. In one notable scene, Christopher Walken plays a reporter interviewing Basquiat about his work. Pointedly, the Walken character addresses what many viewed as the white establishment’s appropriation of Basquiat’s artistic viewpoint, a viewpoint that his first agent refers to as “the true voice of the gutter.” As the reporter notes, however, the painter hardly grew up in the slums himself; his father is an accountant. To a degree, Basquiat’s shabby life, including the homelessness presented early in the film, is self-imposed and performative. The reporter accuses Basquiat himself of the very appropriation of a message that Basquiat’s friends accuse the white establishment of.

And this is ultimately the real central conflict of the film – who owns an artistic viewpoint and message? It’s a conflict addressed within the film and, in a very meta manner, within the film’s production. After the film’s release, Jeffrey Wright, the actor who portrayed Basquiat, accused Schnabel of manipulating and co-opting his performance and the dead painter’s life for the director’s own self-aggrandizement. Wright claimed that by representing himself as close to Basquiat, Schnabel inflated his own worth, just as Basquiat’s contemporary New York art elite elevated themselves by bringing the “voice of the gutter” on canvases into their homes. If you can look past the director’s uncomfortably personal stakes in the film’s plot, it offers up plenty of food for thought on the subject and will leave you pondering long after the final credits.

Don't miss the other blog posts in my series on movies about artists!

10 Movies You Should See About Artists:

• #10 - Andrei Rublev
• #9 - Lust for Life
• #8 - Goya's Ghosts
• #7 - Pollock
• #5 - Girl with a Pearl Earring
• #4 - The Agony and the Ecstasy