Walking through the gallery, it’s the loudness of the paintings that hits you. A work from 1982, Anybody Speaking Words, is in screaming yellow and black, with a tonsil-filled mouth singing the word “OPERA, OPERA, OPERA” while the performer’s body vibrates with lines, squiggles and curlicues. King Zulu [pictured above] is a field of loud sky-blue populated with the figures of legendary jazz artists: Louis Armstrong clutching his trumpet, Charlie Parker on saxophone, an all-star band for all time. Not far away, you encounter Armstrong and Parker again, in a collage called Plastic Sax from 1984. In the corner of the frame, there’s scribbled a single explosive word surrounded by cartoonish clouds: “KABOOM”
In the 34 years since his death at 27, there have been almost as many attempts to unpick the complex, multifaceted work of Jean-Michel Basquiat as there have been exhibitions and news stories featuring him. In his own time, he was applauded for bringing the scrappy, manic energy of street art to the mainstream art world (too scrappy for many museums, who turned down offers to acquire his paintings and must now be kicking themselves). Some have interpreted him as an arch-postmodernist, an Afrofuturist, even a reborn Beat poet. Others have been intrigued by his complex friendship with Andy Warhol, to the extent that the subject has generated a play, The Collaboration, that’s soon to become a film. As the Black Lives Matter movement has built and built, Basquiat has belatedly been acknowledged as one of the most politicised African American artists of his generation, who confronted police violence and America’s toxic relationship with race.
