YOUNG FUN.(Jean-Michel Basquiat)

Jean-Michel Basquiat, the subject of an important, intensely enjoyable retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, made nearly all of his best paintings, which are very good indeed, at the age of twenty-one, in 1982. He was not mature beyond his years. He expressed attitudes that are distinctly adolescent, when not childish, in a taunting, arch, almost self-parodic style that started going to pieces the moment it came together. Thereby, Basquiat closely resembled a poet who quit writing poetry before the age of twenty: Arthur Rimbaud. A quotation in this show's catalogue from Rimbaud's "A Season in Hell" sent me back to that work, written in 1873, which gave exalted, hilarious, altogether uncanny voice to teen-age narcissism:

My turn now. The story of one of my insanities. . . .What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings. . . . I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents. . . . I invented colors for the vowels!--A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. . . . I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.

Basquiat was like that, right down to the sprightly tastes and the romance of recondite erudition. His paintings bristle with antic self-instruction in history, anatomy, mythology, and education itself, as when he proposes an ideal order of knowledge: "1. sports 2. opera 3. weapons." His innumerable masklike heads exhaustively anthropologize a tribal civilization that never was. And he regularly gave color to sound, finding painterly equivalents for the effects on him of his musical heroes--Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix. As for the deliberate "derangement of all the senses" that Rimbaud recommended to poets, Basquiat was only too game.

He was famous in the art world by the beginning of 1982, and rich soon afterward. Drugs, drink, sex, and bad behavior briefly fuelled, then devastated, his genius. He died of a drug overdose in 1988--"tragically," it says in a wall text at the show which a friend of mine testifies to having misread, at first glance, as "traditionally." Indeed, Basquiat's life and career adhered to a classical (in our day, tabloid) trajectory of rise, fall, and doom, though with an unusually sunny epilogue. Not only do his paintings now sell for ever more millions at auction; serious critical appreciation and art-historical validation, withheld from him in life, are coming around. Basquiat turns out to be the essential American Neo-Expressionist painter of the early nineteen-eighties, the one who made the most of that time's revival--or pastiche, or lampoon--of long-lapsed and despised styles of showy subjectivity in modern art. Simply, he brought lyrical truth to a movement that swam and, ultimately, drowned in facetiousness. Simultaneous references, in one painting, to anatomy drawings by da Vinci and to the steel-driving man John Henry precipitate a funny, unfeigned paean to the literally and figuratively muscular in life, art, and legend. In terms of style, what Julian Schnabel performed with operatic bombast, David Salle with theatrical gall, and any number of others with academic irony, Basquiat brought off with spontaneous conviction. Whatever historical modes stirred him--Expressionism, "primitivism," art brut, Pop--lived anew, for a spell, at his hands, as did the influence of paragons including Picasso, Dubuffet, Pollock, and Twombly. Meanwhile, his unhappy story gave a fresh, perhaps valedictory turn to the myth of the poete maudit, a revelatory, self-immolating figure of terrible delight.

Basquiat was born in Brooklyn to a Haitian father--a successful accountant, with whom he had a difficult relationship--and a sensitive, emotionally unstable Puerto Rican mother, who nurtured his talent from an early age. He left home and high school at the age of seventeen and got himself discovered by the art world as the gnomic graffitist samo (for "same old"). "Pay for soup / Build a fort / Set that on fire," went ...