Two Biographies Painstakingly Seek To Understand Basquiat, but His Art Remains Elusive

‘Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Making of an Icon’By Doug WoodhamThames & Hudson, 296 pages‘Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art—The Biography of a Painter’s MeteoricRise From Downtown Graffiti to International Fame’By Phoebe HobanHarper Perennial, 528 pagesDoug Woodham’s work appears at the same time as a new paperback edition ofPhoebe Hoban’s 1998 biography. Mr. Woodham alludes to her book as “whatwas long considered the definitive biography of Basquiat,” immediatelydestroying the idea of definitive by adding, “much has changed with respect tohis reputation and in the market for his work.” Art historians and curators,Woodham notes, now have shifted focus to how “an artist’s race gender andsexuality inform their engagement with themes such as oppression,discrimination and inequality.” With over 100 new interviews, Mr. Woodham certainly enriches a portrayal of the man and his art, and also has the advantage of showing how an artist is created, so to speak, in the way his legacy is distributed and celebrated. In her new introduction, Ms. Hoban notes that since the publication of herbiography, Basquiat’s “reputation has skyrocketed: more than a hundred showsworldwide; multiple record-breaking auction prices; a plethora of products thatboast his images, from skateboards to iPhone covers (Basquiat, the ubiquitousbrand); and an ambitious slew of avaricious imitators, from wannabe emergingartists to brazen forgers.”Ms. Hoban additionally acknowledges in her new introduction Basquiat’s “posthumous career”—made possible, in part, because he was such a sampler of so many different cultural artifacts and expressions from cartoons to jazz to art history as well as making his own story inseparable from his art. Mr. Woodham adds that an element of manipulation has to be considered as well the efforts of the artist’s father to delimit how much could be told about his son that a biographer can now expose.Ms. Hoban’s introduction seems aimed at including more detail aboutBasquiat’s growing reputation, as if to shore up her own work as a way tocompete with Mr. Woodham’s. I regret that she did not say why her bookremains relevant no matter how much new material a subsequent biographerproduces, just as I regret that Mr. Woodham does no more than briefly acknowledge her reign as “definitive” biographer.Biography is about so much more than bringing the news and biographers dothemselves a disservice by emphasizing only what is supposedly new, althoughthat is what publishers want to hear and what they want to sell. What is so oftenmissing is a lack of dialogue between biographies of the same subject. Whichbiographer, for example, reckons best with the art, with what Basquiat had toshow in “Irony of a Negro Policeman,” and which Ms. Hoban describes as the artist’s “deeply distraught” reaction to the death of a fellow graffiti artist brutally beaten to death by six white policemen. “It could have been me,” Basquiat said.The figure in a black and dark blue uniform looks flattened out, like a piece ofgraffiti on a wall. This acrylic and oil stick on wood composition, with the title missing an “o” and “i” in policeman, is deliberately cryptic and seems overwritten with other messages, the beginnings of words, the scratchings one sees on graffiti walls. The right side of the body is split off (dismembered), the face a mask, and the squiggles in red and a red hat (bespeaking an identity not part of the uniform) on top of what you might make out as a policeman’s cap, invite symbolic interpretations but also a resistance to anything like a definitiveassessment.What first thrilled art historians, patrons, and dealers about Basquiat is how hebrought into galleries a street art that seemed in dialogue with so manydifferent aspects of American culture even as he stood apart from it, horrified,sometimes, at what he saw and what he feared could be done to him. Although these two biographies aim to explain the life and work of an artist, they also need to be generous with one another in demonstrating how much of Basquiat’s work remains powerfully elusive, suggesting, as in “Irony of a Negro Policeman,” what we are missing in those absent letters in a painting that refuses to spell out the whole story.Mr. Rollyson writes about art in “Essays in Biography.”

Two Biographies Painstakingly Seek To Understand Basquiat, but His Art Remains Elusive

More from the New York Sun

Taliban Frees American Academic Held More Than Year

Belgium Deploys Troops To Protect Jewish Sites as Iran-Linked Group Claims Attacks Across Europe

California Governor Debate Abruptly Cancelled After Participation Rules Exclude All Non-White Candidates

More from the New York Sun

Taliban Frees American Academic Held More Than Year

Belgium Deploys Troops To Protect Jewish Sites as Iran-Linked Group Claims Attacks Across Europe

California Governor Debate Abruptly Cancelled After Participation Rules Exclude All Non-White Candidates

Vance Leads 2028 GOP Presidential Contenders in Polling, but Rubio’s Star Is Rising in First-in-the-Nation Primary State

Oil Market Trades Executed Minutes Before Trump Iran Announcement Net Mystery Buyers $580 Million in Profits

Delta Air Lines Suspends Special Services for Members of Congress Amid DHS Shutdown

A ‘Yentl’ Adaptation That Finally Captures the Spirit of Isaac Bashevis Singer

Epic Fury: What New Arms Are in Play