By now, we have all been primed to believe that art made by self-taught, Expressionist, and Outsider artists may be purer than that made by artists who have been formally trained. Their work – rough around the edges, unsullied by the academy, born of the provinces or the street – is beyond mainstream comprehension and traditional, critical approach. Naive and intuitively driven, not only is their art indifferent to the establishment – it is, by its very nature, above the establishment. That is, until it is institutionally sanctioned and art-historically canonized – and then its conflicted inside/outside position confuses things.

This inborn confusion surrounds the work of self-taught painter Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88), whose two-floor retrospective of more than 100 paintings, drawings, and assemblages opens tomorrow at the Brooklyn Museum. Basquiat, who died of a drug overdose, is the epitome of the 1980s New York art-world superstar. Born of upper-middle-class Brooklyn parents (a Haitian-American father and a Puerto Rican-American mother), Basquiat was a high school dropout who began his career as a graffiti artist in the late 1970s. Working with his friend Al Diaz, he spray painted aphorisms all over lower Manhattan under the tag SAMO (“same old, same old” or “same old s–“), finally letting his true identity be known in 1980.

In 1981, Annina Nosei, Basquiat’s first dealer, gave him a studio in the basement of her gallery. There he started churning out acclaimed, graffiti-inspired Neo-Expressionist paintings and text-based drawings by the dozens. Inspired by Cy Twombly, Dubuffet, Miro, the Abstract Expressionists, late Guston, and Picasso, Basquiat’s works dealt with issues of race, oppression, and inequality; Greco-Roman, Creole, and African tribal myths; jazz music, hip-hop and popular culture. Some paintings were executed on found doors, windows, fences, pieces of metal, and football helmets.

Nearly every one of Basquiat’s works contains indecipherable symbols. Most were painted – seemingly rapidly – wet into wet, with black and white or bright tube colors on raw canvas. Gestation and conservation be damned: It was as if the ideas were flowing too quickly for the artist to mix paint, let alone to be concerned with longevity. Composed of collage, oil, acrylic, spray paint, and – occasionally – blood, the early works contain much of the cryptic iconography: crowns, cars, halos, masks, arrows, airplanes, buildings, text fragments, diagrams, and stick figures – all childishly and obsessively scrawled – that would occupy his 10-year career as an artist.

His career advanced quickly, tragically: By 1982, when Basquiat produced well more than 200 works, he was world-famous. Andy Warhol took him under his wing, letting him live in and use his studio and collaborating with him on paintings. Soon, Basquiat had lots of dealers, shows, money, and drugs; he showed his paintings in Zurich, Rome, Tokyo, and Rotterdam; he dated Madonna. In 1985, at the peak of his fame, he was on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. But the drugs took their toll, and the artist’s work truly began to fall off, losing the power and originality it once possessed. In 1988, he overdosed on heroin.

Part of Basquiat’s allure is his meteoric career, the speed of which is echoed in each of his seemingly dashed-off, childish paintings. Walking through the show, however, I became fatigued: I wanted to like the work, but I felt as if I were experiencing the same frenetic painting over and over again. Basquiat had an intuitive hand and a real gift for throwing many things together in a single image, and he made the best possible use of his limited abilities. But his childish drawing, even though it feels more genuine than many imitators of children’s art, fails to rise above caricature and self-consciousness. It feels like it is hiding ineptitude.

Basquiat was inventive, unique, and persistent, and many of his works are compelling in areas. But he rarely pulled together a complete painting. His crude, piecemeal, everything-in-the-soup approach to making a picture was, from the outset, at odds with the act of composing. So it is almost a shock in this show when a work muscles its way, as if against the artist’s will, toward cohesion. Usually this happened when Basquiat relied less on words to carry the weight of the picture.

Two wonderful paintings of heads, “Untitled (Head)” (1981) and “In This Case” (1983) are both large, roughly 7 feet tall. “Untitled (Head)” is a roughhewn, blue and orange monster. “In This Case” is red, black, white, and yellow. In both works, it feels as if the artist is exploring a range of complex pictorial and metaphoric possibilities within the structure of the heads; freakishly large, they become city, skull, shrunken head on a stick, diagram, map, machine, and anxious energy. Basquiat lets color, shape, and mark move us through the paintings.

Too many of Basquiat’s works, however, rely on the narrative power of words or cartoonish pictures. In “Jim Crow” (1986), the artist labels every image in the painting, which cancels rather than expands their power. In “Three Quarters of Olympia Minus the Servant” and ” Untitled (Maid from Olympia)” (both 1982), the paintings – take-offs on Manet’s “Olympia” – depend almost entirely upon the recognition of the removal or displacement of the black maid.

Basquiat was able to move easily between graffiti, story, and painting or within the murky world where picture, word, image, sign, and tombstone merge, as in his homage to Charlie Parker, “Charles the First” (1982) and his “To Repel Ghosts” (1986). There were also times when he, who was at heart a Contructivist, demonstrated that he understood the power of an isolated, dark figure, built out of stacked rectangles, floating in the center of the canvas, as in “Flexible” (1984) and “Irony of the Negro Policeman” (1981); that he was aware of how to activate and humanize an otherwise flat and monstrous woman with the suddenness of a volumetric breast, as in “Arroz con Pollo” (1981); that, as in “Television and Cruelty to Animals” (1983), weird things start to happen when the head of a frightened moose (Bullwinkle?), a bat, and an 8-ball are juxtaposed with swastikas and the words “Masonic Lodge No. 45” and “Popeye Versus the Nazis.”

Certainly Basquiat is the best of the 1980s graffiti artists. The question remains: is that the epithet an artist hopes for?

Until June 5, 2005 (200 Eastern Parkway, 718-638-5000).