Chapter 1The Crown

Foreword

I have spent my working life in the eighteenth century. My subjects are the revolutionaries of the Atlantic world — the men and women who looked at a system built to convert their bodies into entries in a ledger and decided, against every visible fact of their situation, that they were sovereign. My family traces its roots to the plantations around Cap-Haïtien, and I have spent thirty years reading the documents those plantations produced: the inventories, the account books, the correspondence between owners who discussed human beings in the vocabulary of sugar. So when I told colleagues I was writing a book about a painter who died in New York in 1988, more than one of them asked, gently, what had happened to my period. He was not my subject, they meant. He was downtown galleries and auction records and the East Village at three in the morning. He was two centuries out of my archive.

He was exactly my subject. He was a Haitian accountant's son who drew crowns.

That is the shortest honest description of why I wrote this book. The crown is the oldest gesture in the tradition I study — the claim of royalty made by a person the surrounding system has classified as property, as labor, as spectacle, as anything but a sovereign. I had traced that gesture through the eighteenth-century Caribbean until I believed I knew its every variation. Then I looked, really looked, at a young Black man in a SoHo basement in 1981, painting canvases that were sold upstairs while they were still wet, watching the money vanish into a dealer's expense accounts, and drawing crowns above the heads of his figures the entire time. The basement below and the commerce above. The maker in the enclosure and the buyers on the stairs. The ledger in someone else's hands. I did not have to strain to see the continuity. The continuity announced itself, and my whole training obligated me to follow it.

I expected, when I began, to be writing art history at an uncomfortable distance from my competence. That is not what happened. The record I worked from — the auction results, the published memoirs of the people who knew him, the press archives, the interviews he gave and the interviews given about him after his death — turned out to be a record I already knew how to read, because it is substantially an economic record. It documents prices, commissions, deductions, appreciations, and the permanent severance of the maker from the value of the thing made. I expected the wild child of the brand, the instinctive genius of the museum wall text. I found instead a reader. A trilingual autodidact who studied anatomy and history and the mechanics of his own exploitation with a rigor his marketers spent his whole career denying. The primitive of the 1980s reviews never existed. The historian existed. He was doing my kind of work with a paintbrush, and doing it faster than I have ever done it.

This book is named for a gallery because the gallery is where the whole structure becomes visible at once — the gift and the containment, the patronage and the zoo, the genuine admiration and the fifty percent. I have tried not to prosecute anyone. The eighteenth century taught me that systems do their work through people of ordinary decency, and the Annina Nosei Gallery was staffed by people of ordinary decency. The system is the subject. The basement is merely where it can be observed under fluorescent light.

What makes Basquiat worth a book — worth this book, from this historian — is that he saw it too. He named the arrangement he was inside of with a precision the polite vocabulary of his industry never permitted, and he painted his account of it onto a thousand canvases in eight years, and then the system that he had described absorbed the description, priced it, and sold it back to the world at a hundred million dollars a canvas. The revolutionaries I study mostly lost, and their claims outlived them anyway. He is in that company. I wrote this book to put him there formally.

— Andre Toussaint, Providence

Chapter 1 · The Crown

The crown is everywhere. You have seen it on tote bags and sneakers and museum gift-shop merchandise. You have seen it on phone cases and skateboards and the wall art decorating coffee shops in cities the artist never visited. You have seen it on a Uniqlo t-shirt priced at $19.90 and on a Coach handbag priced at $450 and on a Tiffany & Co. campaign featuring Beyoncé and Jay-Z in which a Basquiat painting, Equals Pi (1982), served as the backdrop for a diamond necklace the jewelry house had manufactured for the occasion. You have seen it on a Barbie doll released by Mattel in 2020 for a retail price of around fifty dollars, the doll's clothing bearing a miniature reproduction of Untitled (1982). You have seen it on the cover of a Jay-Z album, inside the lyrics of half a dozen hip-hop tracks, in the set design of a Hulu special, on the Instagram feeds of an estimated two million accounts that use the hashtag #basquiat to frame selfies, coffee cups, and sneaker photographs. You have seen it at the top of a painting that sold, in 2017, for $110.5 million at Sotheby's, the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by an American artist at the time of sale. The crown is the logo of an artist named Jean-Michel Basquiat, and in the thirty-seven years since his death it has become one of the most recognizable visual marks in contemporary art. It is the late-twentieth-century equivalent of the Campbell's soup can, an image so widely distributed it no longer requires explanation, an image that has migrated from the original art object into the general visual vocabulary of consumer culture.

The crown was Basquiat's. He drew it on canvases, paper, postcards, t-shirts, the walls of buildings in Lower Manhattan in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He drew it as signature, as claim, as commentary, as joke, and as self-coronation that the art world he was entering had no idea how to interpret. He was a Black artist in an art world that had never made room for Black artists at the highest commercial level, and he placed crowns above the heads of the figures in his paintings to declare that they (and by extension the painter himself) were royalty in a kingdom the official art establishment refused to recognize. The crown was sincere and ironic simultaneously. It was a serious claim of artistic and racial sovereignty and a winking acknowledgment that the claim was being made in a context (the white-dominated 1980s art market) that would never deliver the sovereignty it implied.

The merchandising is comprehensive. The Brooklyn Museum gift shop sells a Basquiat enamel pin for twelve dollars and a Basquiat silk scarf for one hundred and sixty. The Estate's licensing agency has partnered with Comme des Garçons, Herschel Supply Co., Saint Laurent, Reebok, Valentino, and a long list of smaller brands that attach the crown to leather, denim, canvas, and vinyl. Jay-Z has referenced Basquiat in several songs, most famously on "Picasso Baby" from the 2013 album Magna Carta Holy Grail, where he casts himself as the heir to Jean-Michel, invoking the painter's name as a measure of his own arrival. Kanye West has referenced him. Swizz Beatz, the record producer who owns a substantial Basquiat collection, has referenced him. The crown has become, in the hip-hop vernacular of the twenty-first century, a shorthand for Black artistic success at the scale the art market measures success. It is an entry in a catalog of prestige signifiers alongside Rolexes, Bugattis, and Hermès Birkin bags. It is a symbol of having arrived.

The crown is everywhere. Basquiat is almost nowhere. This is the most successful posthumous brand-building campaign in the history of contemporary art, and like the Frida Kahlo brand it has been conducted without the consent of its subject and against most of the things its subject actually believed and made.

He was Black and Latino, the son of a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, both immigrants in the second sense. His mother was U.S.-born, the daughter of Puerto Rican immigrants, and Puerto Rico is itself a colony; the Caribbean is the underwater historical foundation connecting both sides of his family across centuries of African-diasporic displacement. He spoke French and Spanish and English fluently. He read Greek and Roman history, anatomy textbooks, jazz biographies, and whatever else a self-educated young person who had run away from home and was sleeping in friends' apartments could assemble from the books that happened to be around. He played in a noise band. He sold hand-painted postcards and t-shirts on the street to buy food. He lived, for several crucial years, in a state closer to homelessness than to the bohemian poverty of the romantic narratives later applied to him. And he became, between approximately 1980 and 1985, the most important young artist in the world: the central figure of a downtown New York art scene that the international art market had decided to celebrate, and the first Black American painter to achieve auction-record-setting commercial success during his own lifetime.

He was twenty-seven when he died. He was making art professionally for less than a decade. He left behind approximately a thousand paintings and a couple of thousand drawings, most of them made in the eight years between 1980 and 1988, in a furious productivity no other major painter has matched in so short a period. The work was extraordinary at the time and is extraordinary now. It has since become the subject of more scholarly attention, more museum retrospectives, and more commercial reproduction than the work of any other Black American artist before him.

The brand has erased the person. The crown has replaced the man. The crown is on the merchandise, and the merchandise is for sale, and the merchandise generates revenue flowing to estate managers and licensing agents and gallery owners and auction houses and museum gift-shop operators. Almost none of it flows to the people Basquiat actually came from: to the Brooklyn Black and Caribbean communities he was raised in, to the downtown artists who were his peers and friends, to the family members and lovers and collaborators closest to him during his short life. The economics of the Basquiat aftermarket reproduce the very dynamics Basquiat spent his life painting about, and the painting has not been sufficient to prevent those dynamics from extending past his death. The art world made him. The art world ate him. The art world is still selling the bones.

This biography proceeds in the Schiff tradition that the previous Frida Kahlo biography in this series also followed: the legend is catalogued, then dismantled, then replaced with the actual person. The actual Basquiat is harder to recover than the actual Frida, partly because Basquiat died younger and left less personal documentation behind, and partly because the brand has been even more aggressive in colonizing his image. But the recovery is possible, and it is necessary, because the gap between the brand and the person is the gap that has produced almost every misunderstanding of his work and his life.

The actual Basquiat read constantly. He thought rigorously about race, history, colonialism, and the political economy of the art world. He understood, with greater clarity than most of his contemporaries, that the art world was using him as a token of progressive racial inclusion while paying him far less than it paid his white contemporaries for comparable work and while marketing his Blackness as a feature of the product rather than as the property of an autonomous person. The actual Basquiat was a sophisticated political thinker disguised, by the marketing apparatus surrounding him, as an "instinctive" or "primitive" or "raw" street artist. The brand still uses these adjectives. The biographies that built the brand still use them. The adjectives are wrong.

This biography also has to address the heroin. Heroin killed him, and heroin has been integrated into the brand as one of the romantic elements of the dead-Black-genius narrative, the idea that the drugs were part of the genius, that addiction and talent were aspects of the same fire. This too is wrong. The heroin was a slow-motion suicide undertaken by a young man who could not figure out how to live in the position the art world had placed him in and who lacked any available framework for escaping that position except self-destruction. The heroin killed him because heroin kills people. The romantic narrative is the brand's attempt to convert an avoidable death into something meaningful, and the conversion is one of the things this biography refuses.

He was twenty-seven years old on August 12, 1988, when his girlfriend Kelle Inman found him unresponsive on the floor of the bedroom of the loft he rented from Andy Warhol at 57 Great Jones Street, in the NoHo neighborhood of Manhattan. He had been dead for several hours. The autopsy identified the cause of death as acute mixed drug intoxication: opiates and cocaine, the speedball combination that has killed many famous people including, six years before Basquiat, the actor John Belushi. He was buried in Brooklyn, at Green-Wood Cemetery, in a grave that for many years bore no marker except a simple stone. The grave is now a destination for visitors who come to leave flowers and small objects in tribute. Most of them know him from the brand. Some know him from the work. A few know him from the actual life that this biography will attempt to recover, beginning in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in 1960, in the apartment of the Haitian immigrant accountant and the Puerto Rican-American mother who had decided, before either of them knew what they had decided, to raise the child who would become Jean-Michel Basquiat.

His name was Jean-Michel Basquiat. He was born on the twenty-second of December, 1960. He died on the twelfth of August, 1988. The crown is everywhere. The man is the subject of this book.

The price record at Sotheby's in May 2017 warrants a closer look at the outset, because this single transaction has done more than any other to shape the contemporary perception of Basquiat as a commercial phenomenon, and that perception is one of the things any honest biography must engage with before moving to the harder questions of what the work meant and what the man was. The painting that sold for $110.5 million was Untitled (1982), an enormous canvas, over six feet on a side, depicting a single skull-like head against a blue background, with the dense layered mark-making and the jagged tooth-row that became one of Basquiat's signature compositional motifs in the early 1980s. A private collector had purchased it in the 1980s for a price variously reported as between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand dollars, held it for more than thirty years, and consigned it for sale in 2017 because the market for Basquiat had reached a point at which the realized price would, in the seller's judgment, far exceed anything subsequent appreciation could produce within a reasonable holding period.

The buyer was the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, founder of the online clothing retailer Zozotown and one of the most active buyers in the contemporary art market in the years preceding the sale. Maezawa acquired the Basquiat in a heated bidding contest that drove the price well past the pre-sale estimate of around sixty million dollars. The hammer price was ninety-eight million; with the buyer's premium, the final price reached $110.5 million. The sale broke the previous record for any work by an American artist at auction (held by an Andy Warhol painting sold in 2013) and broke the record for any work by a Black American artist by a margin so large that it effectively created a new category of valuation.

The implications were complicated. On one hand, the sale vindicated Basquiat's importance as an artist, a confirmation, in the language the contemporary art market understands best, that his work was as valuable as the work of his most prominent white contemporaries and was, in fact, more valuable than most of it. On the other hand, the sale illustrated a bitter irony: a painting he had sold for a few thousand dollars in the 1980s was now generating a hundred million dollars for collectors and auction houses who had not made the painting and had not known the man. His family, his collaborators, his estate received only a fraction of the appreciated value. The painting he made was generating wealth for everyone except the people who had been part of his life.

The Maezawa purchase also triggered predictable commentary about whether Basquiat was now "overpriced," whether the hundred-million-dollar valuation was a bubble that would correct or a genuine reflection of his canonical place. In Basquiat's case, the commentary was complicated by race. Some argued the purchase represented belated recognition that Black artists had been denied for generations; others argued it was speculative froth produced by new wealthy buyers entering the contemporary market. Both readings carry weight. The Maezawa purchase condensed the whole apparatus of the Basquiat aftermarket into eighteen minutes at Sotheby's on May 18, 2017. The auctioneer Oliver Barker opened the bidding at $57 million. The painting, lit from above on a black velvet easel in the crowded York Avenue salesroom, drew competing bids from phone banks representing collectors in Asia and Europe. The increments climbed from half a million to a million to two million dollars. At $90 million the room went quiet. At $98 million, Maezawa's representative gave the hammer nod. The final price, with buyer's premium, reached $110.5 million. Maezawa posted an Instagram photograph of himself embracing the painting the next day, announcing his intention to house it in a museum he planned to build. The museum has not yet been built. The photograph has been viewed several million times.

The Basquiat market is partly corrective and partly bubble. The corrective is what the biography engages with as a serious historical phenomenon; the bubble can be left to the financial commentators.

What the biography can say with confidence is that the price record is not the artistic record. The artistic record is the body of work itself: approximately a thousand paintings, two thousand drawings, a series of collaborations, a small body of writing. That body of work has its own value independent of any single transaction. It would be valuable even if no painting had ever sold for more than the original 1980s prices. The market is part of the context, and the market is one of the things the biography addresses, but the market is not the work. The work is what survives the market's shifting enthusiasms and corrections. Basquiat made it in the eight years between 1980 and 1988. The work is still here. The market will do whatever the market does. The work will outlast it.