Basquiat: An Artist's Fast Life

He was hot. He was cool. He was a megavolt jolt that electrified the 1980s art world, reports Harry Smith for Sunday Morning.

A kid already rich and famous by the time he landed on the cover of The New York Times Magazine at age 24, mocking his success by appearing barefoot in an Armani suit.

Then he was dead.

At New York's Brooklyn Museum, two floors of paintings almost scratch the surface of the universe that was Jean-Michel Basquiat.

You walk in and the place is shaking.

"There's energy. There's vibration. He really understands color," says Marc Mayer, a curator of what has been called "one of the major museum shows of the year." Adds Mayer, "I have never seen acrylic painting where the color is so strong."

It was art by its own rules: anti-establishment, spontaneous, childlike, bold, and flippant. It earned Basquiat an almost immediate following, especially among the young.

"When I was 24, he was the one," says Mayer. "He was the master."

Jean-Michel Basquiat was born December 1960 in Brooklyn, N.Y. His father was Haitian, and his mother Puerto Rican. Often depressed, she was periodically institutionalized. The marriage ended in divorce. The drawing, says his father, Gerard Basquiat,started by age 4. By the age of 9, it was an obsession.

From the beginning, says his father, art was his son's main passion.

"And it's like yesterday. There's Jean-Michel sitting on the ground. His artwork on the wall being held by a string, a rope." He recalls his son saying, "Papa, you do not understand it, but it's my life. And one day I'm going to be very famous."

By high school, Jean-Michel dropped out, left home, and set out on his own. Soon after, he starred in "Downtown 81," a movie loosely based on his life as an artist at the dawn of a new New York scene.

One shot features Basquiat spray-painting the cryptic street poetry that earned him a local following as SAMO (for "same old, same old").

"They were always where there was going to be a great party some night. Suddenly there's a SAMO graffiti on the wall next to the entrance to that private party. He knew where stuff was happening," says Mayer.

"He was included in a group show of young New York artists from all the boroughs and it was called the Times Square Show," says Mayer, "and he was singled out as one of the most interesting of the artists in that show by the critics." He was 19 or 20.

In the world of art, the rest of Basquiat's story has taken on a life of its own: his overnight success, his electric charisma, and his heavy drug use. He dated Madonna, and became best pals with artist Keith Haring. Was he homeless? Maybe. It's the stuff of legend.

In the 1996 movie Basquiat, David Bowie plays Andy Warhol in his first encounter Basquiat. Warhol supposedly agreed to buy some art from him, but tries to haggle him down from $10 to $5.

It wasn't long before Warhol and Basquiat became close friends, remembers art dealer Tony Shafrazi.

"Warhol is very impressed with Jean-Michel's seriousness, his intention of being a good artist, and his constant preoccupation of wanting to work constantly," says Shafrazi. "And what's remarkable in fact is that they built such an interesting relationship that they decided to work on the same paintings together. Collaborate in a way that's never happened before."

It was in part, says Shafrazi, Basquiat's pure innocence and spirit that took the art world by storm.

"The distinctiveness, the uniqueness. And then as to what makes it so incredible is the fact that the line is very original. It's very fearless. Just the nature of the line. From the beginning on how far it goes. The way of depiction. The size of depiction. It's completely original."

Close friend and gallery owner Jeffrey Deitch remembers Basquiat's studio as one of the most exciting he ever visited.

"There'd be drawings on the floor. He'd walk all over them, spill paint. And part of that randomness, that, you know, that random energy, gave the work a lot of its special quality."

But not everyone in the art world was raving about Basquiat. Some dismissed him as mere hype. Detractors said he was riding on the comet of trend, it wasn't really art, it wasn't going to last, and it was just what was hip at the moment.

But Mayer notes, "Matisse was also that. Picasso was also that. A really bright artist wants to know what the flavor of the month is, hooks their wagon to that, because they've got something to say." He continues, "Well that's Basquiat. He got the audience, and then he started to speak."

Through his art, Basquiat spoke about the black American experience. He paid homage to boxers and jazz musicians. He created his own pantheon.

"Every one of his paintings is an improvisation. He's working intuitively. He didn't prepare them," says Mayer. "It's as if he's painting in public... It's 'Right now, right here I'm going to make a picture.' And... that's like jazz, very much.... Except the jazz musicians are having a conversation with each other, Basquiat's having a conversation with art history."

A figure donning a beret, with his finger to his temple, is supposed to be Rodin's "Thinker."

"It's a wonderful gag. It's hysterically funny," says Mayer.

Another work is a history of the world, encompassing everything from Joseph and pyramids, all the philosophers and Greece and Rome, and everything else, down to Creole culture, emancipation and the Washington Red Skins.

"It's everything," says Mayer, "just including all of human knowledge and human history into one body of work. As if he knew everything and was part of everything. As if he was the ultimate genius of all time. And a crazy person to boot."

In August of 1988, Basquiat died of a heroin overdose. He was 27.

He left behind works numbering in the thousands.

"And so, it's amazing that there is so much variety in it.... The found objects.... His last works are full of text and signs.... He had an inventory of ideas that just blow your mind. He could have gone on forever... because he had that much up in here. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way," says Mayer.

In his short life, Basquiat's father told us, the one thing Jean-Michel craved above all else was to become a part of art history. In 2002, Basquiat's "Profit" sold at a Christie's auction for $5.5 million. Today, the estimated value of his body of work is in the hundreds of millions. Basquiat wouldn't have cared about the money, but he would have loved the headline.