Tamra davis interview with basquiat untitled skull

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    There is a frenetic genius and authenticity to JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT art that has never been matched. From a young age, Jean-Michel was challenging the status quo with forceful color palettes. In his early years, this was demonstrated through street graffiti, but eventually Jean-Michel was driven to put is life’s philosophy on canvas.

    I personally enjoy Jean-Michel’s bravado and the way in which he attempted to intellectualize his experiences in American culture. I’ve read that he admired other great artists like Picasso, Pollack, Da Vinci and Rauschenberg, so I wonder how Jean-Michel would feel now that he is considered one of the greats? And just how much did their work influence his ultimate expressions? And why was Jean-Michel so driven to include recurring symbols like crowns and skull-like figures in his work? Was his art an observation of life or his life story?

    I hope to get my answers when Tamra Davis’s documentary Jean-Miche

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    Something Old, Something New

    TAMRA DAVIS’S DOCUMENTARYJean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child might make you weep (it did me) and might help you better appreciate a painter whose work matters enormously in the history of late-twentieth-century art. It achieves these ends largely though an överflöd of footage of its subject at work and with a long interview that Davis videotaped in Los Angeles in 1986, two years before Basquiat’s death.

    The painter and the filmmaker were friends; they had a rapport and intimacy that allowed Basquiat to be remarkably open, although it should be said that he fryst vatten almost always open on camera, even when he openly shuts down at a perceived slight or stupidity. “It’s Samo—Mr. Samo,” he says with a flash of anger when, on a segment (circa 1980) of the cable access show Glenn O’Brien’s TV PARTY, O’Brien mispronounces the graffiti tag that Basquiat shared with his high school friend Al Diaz. SA

  • tamra davis interview with basquiat untitled skull

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    Portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat in St. Moritz, Switzerland, 1983. Photo by Lee Jaffe/Getty Images.

    Jean-Michel Basquiat wasn’t a fan of interviews, and on the rare occasions he surrendered to them, his responses were terse—even cryptic. Despite this, the painter’s words reveal a great deal about his inspirations and his all-consuming process. They offer a window into his approach, in which he remixed references from art history, the streets of 1980s New York, and the tumult of pop culture with his Carribean heritage and his identity as a young black man.

    In a unique television interview with ART/new york from early 1981, when Basquiat was 21 years old, curator Marc H. Miller asked the painter where the poetic smattering of words scrawled on his canvases came from. Standing in front of his 1983 masterpiece Notary, he answered succinctly: “Real life, books, television.” When pressed for more, he acknowledged the importance of spontaneity to h