Someone was trying to channel the famous graffiti-artist-turned-international-star Jean-Michel Basquiat – both in style and canvas. Basquiat painted on anything he could find – buildings, trains, doors, briefcases, tires, the walls of his girlfriend’s house, her clothes, and even a refrigerator door.
That’s what the auction house was selling: a 1950s Crosley Automatic Shelvador refrigerator door with drawings in the style of Basquiat. The top part showed his symbolic crown, which one artist described as “his three royal lineages: the poet, the musician, the great boxing champion.”
I had seen the item on the auction house website where it was advertised as a “Basquiat inspired Graffiti Decorated Refrigerator.” So I expected to see a full-size refrigerator when I arrived on auction day. But it was only the door, hanging on a wall like a painting in a small room off from the main room at the auction house. This work of art was not signed.
Basquiat’s works have to grow on you – at least that’s what happened with me. On first glance, some of it appears to be something straight out of your worst nightmare or the scribblings of a child. “Believe it or not,” he is quoted on the website of his estate, “I can draw.”
He and his works are admired, respected and collected by a myriad of collectors and museums. I have among my children’s book collection a 1993 book of poems by Maya Angelou with illustrations by the artist. It is titled “Life Doesn’t Frighten Me.”
His works sell into the millions. The highest was $110.5 million for “Untitled,” a 1982 painting purchased by Japanese collector Yusaku Maezawa in 2017. The collector paid $57.3 million for a Basquiat the year before.
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn to a Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother who raised him in a home where he learned to speak French, Spanish and English. As a child, his mother took him to the Brooklyn Museum where he became a junior member. When he was recuperating after being hit by a car while playing in the street, his mother gave him the textbook “Gray’s Anatomy” to read. It fascinated him, and the drawings would influence his art.
While in high school, Basquiat and a friend Al Diaz began tagging their graffiti with “SAMO” (for “same old shit”) on buildings and trains in Brooklyn and Manhattan. People knew their tag before they knew the guys’ names. He and Diaz parted ways, and the tag was finalized as “SAMO IS DEAD.”
On his own, Basquiat made the crown his trademark. It “both acknowledged and challenged the history of Western art. By adorning black male figures, including athletes, musicians and writers, with the crown, Basquiat raised these historically disenfranchised artists to royal even saintly stature.”
That’s not so different from what other African American artists have done in the past and are still doing in their own way, including Kehinde Wiley.
Basquiat soon became a recognized figure, hobnobbing with celebrities and living the high life as he created and sold his art. He also became involved in other endeavors: He was a regular on a TV public access show, appeared in a film and music video, produced a rap record, dated Madonna, formed a band, among other things.
He got his first artistic break when his works were exhibited at the DIY Times Square Show in the early 1980s. He was considered one of the leading artists of the Neo-Expressionism movement, which made the human figure – bold, raw and unadorned – the primary focus of art.
“He very skillfully and purposefully brought together in his art a host of disparate traditions, practices, and styles to create a unique kind of visual collage, one deriving, in part, from his urban origins, and in another a more distant, African-Caribbean heritage,” one story noted.
At the age of 25, Basquiat became the youngest person to exhibit at the world-famous Documenta in Kassel, Germany. He and Andy Warhol collaborated on a series of paintings in the mid-1980s.
Basquiat the street artist had made a meteoric rise into the international art world and was reaping its monetary benefits.
“I watched him sell his first painting to Deborah Harry for $200, and then a few months later he was selling paintings for $20,000 each, selling them faster than he could paint them,” said girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk said in an interview in the British newspaper the Guardian. “I watched him make his first million. We went from stealing bread on the way home from the Mudd Club and eating pasta to buying groceries at Dean & DeLuca; the fridge was full of pastries and caviar, we were drinking Cristal champagne. We were 21 years old.”
The rise came to a tragic end too quickly: Basquiat died in 1988 at age 27 of an accidental drug overdose.
He seemed to have become even more popular in the afterlife. Exhibitions of his works have been held at the Whitney Museum of Art (the first retrospective was October 1992 to February 1993). The Brooklyn Museum has held several exhibits, the most recent this year titled “One Basquiat,” which featured the $110.5 million painting. His paintings have been recently exhibited in France, Frankfurt, Germany, and London, as well as at other museums in the United States.
Basquiat’s works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Both Whitney and MOMA were said to have rejected his art early on, dismissing it as being lightweight with no artistic merit.
I’m not sure of the value of Basquiat’s refrigerator door, but the one at auction was only able to fetch $325, which isn’t bad for a wannabe.
