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SUSAN STAMBERG, host:
Tomorrow, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York opens a retrospective of the work of Jean Michel Basquiat. The artist began his career scrawling grafitti on the walls of lower Manhattan. A few years later, he joined Andy Warhol's entourage, and his paintings were selling around the world. Basquiat died of a heroine overdose in 1988 at the age of 27. Admirers say his work can outlive the '80s art boom. Critics insist he's a combination of minimal talent, maximum hype. David D'Arcy reports.
DAVID D'ARCY REPORTING:
In less than a decade, Jean Michel Basquiat turned out thousands of paintings and drawings for an army of rich, new collectors. His canvasses were often a swarm of symbols, words and stick figures. He also painted and drew grotesque heads, especially skulls screaming in pain. The young, black artist was promoted as a raw, untrained spirit from the New York street, a myth which Basquiat himself helped propagate, as in this 1985 interview on a British Channel 4 documentary.
JEAN MICHEL BASQUIAT (ARTIST): I--I was really, really naive person, you know, and I just left home and I didn't even think about how I was going to eat or anything, you know?
| UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Why'd you live? You just decided, `I |
can't stand this any more, I've got to...'
BASQUIAT: I was smoking pot in my room and my father came in and he stabbed me in the ass with a knife. And then, you know, I thou--I just thought I'd better go before I--before he killed me, you know?
| REPORTER: And how old were you? |
| BASQUIAT: Four--15. |
D'ARCY: Basquiat, the primitive artist, turned to be the son of an upper middle-class accountant, but that didn't deter those who bought into the Basquiat myth, paying up to $50,000 for his works and much more than that after his death. At least two Basquiat biographies are in the works now, plus a film to be directed by another '80s art millionaire, the painter Julian Schabel. Then there's the Whitney retrospective, the largest that museum...