Amanda LePore – The WOW Report

December 22, 1960– Jean-Michel Basquiat

Gay History, Art History, NYC in the 1970s and 1980s, all my passionate interests intersect when considering the life of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

He was born in the middle-class neighborhood of Park Slope in Brooklyn. His Haitian father was an accountant and a ladies’ man, his mother was Puerto Rican, and she spoke French, Spanish and English. She took young Basquiat to theater and museums in Manhattan. He began to draw when he was four years old, around the time that he was hit by an automobile. His mother gave him a copy of Gray’s Anatomy (the 19th century anatomy text, not Shondaland) while he was in the hospital. He would later make references to the accident and to that book in his paintings.

His father was physically abusive and he once stabbed Basquiat after he was caught having sex with a male cousin. In school, he drew constantly. He was noted as being a talented, angry kid.

When he was 15-years-old, he ran away from home and lived for a while in Washington Square Park where he found friendship and drugs. To support himself, he sold painted t-shirts and postcards on the sidewalk where he was introduced to fellow struggling young artists Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, who became his friends. Their little trio became part of the East Village graffiti scene in the late 1970s. Basquiat’s graffiti was especially witty and poetic. He used the tag “Samo” and he decorated his work with the copyright logo. Artists loved Samo and Basquiat became an underground celebrity.

He was beautiful, charming, intelligent, droll and full of energy. His drugs of choice, heroin and cocaine, made him both euphoric and paranoid.

Basquiat’s big break came with a gallery show in 1981. He presented 15 pieces on lumber and foam rubber found in the rubbish. The pieces were filled with childlike drawings of cars and cartoon characters. All of the work sold at the opening. A demand for original Basquiats only grew stronger and they sold as fast as he could paint them, going for $5,000 – $10,000.

Basquiat lived and worked in his studio where he walked all over his artwork, ate on them, did cocaine off of them, scribbled phone numbers on them, made lists on them.

In March 1982, Basquiat had another sold-out show that garnered good reviews and lots of attention from the press. His output was phenomenal, and was fueled by drugs. He would do a painting a day, but he was given to rages about the pressure to paint. He would sometimes slash the pieces with a razor.

In November 1982, he had a show of portraits of his heroes: Charlie Parker, Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis, at Manhattan’s Fun Gallery. He sold everything from this show also, but Basquiat secretly hid some of his best work so it could not be sold. These canvases were found in a warehouse in Washington Heights years after he left for the great studio in the beyond. They were worth millions.

Andy Warhol was impressed by Basquiat’s energy, youth and talent. Basquiat idolized Warhol, who was the embodiment of contemporary culture. He desperately wanted Warhol’s approval. The two artists became inseparable, working and partying together. Warhol hated drugs; he was appalled, yet intoxicated, by Basquiat’s excesses.

with Warhol, photo by Richard Drew, via YouTube

Warhol and Basquiat had a joint show in September 1985. It was a major media event, followed by a crazy, celebrity filled party at Palladium. But, the show received bad reviews. ArtForum wrote:

“The real question is, who is using whom here?”

Eventually, Warhol could not deal with Basquiat’s drug taking and pulled back from their friendship.

NYC’s 1980’s art scene was filled with imagination and intelligence, but it was also eaten up by the Reagan era of greed and the cult of celebrity. Basquiat claimed that all he wanted was to be famous, but his dream of fame turned out to be a nightmare and his life began to unravel.

In 1985, he appeared on the cover of NY Times Magazine. After Warhol left this world in 1987, Basquiat became increasingly isolated, and his heroin addiction and depression became more of a problem. He made an attempt at sobriety on a retreat to Maui in 1988, but just weeks later Basquiat died, taken by a heroin overdose in his studio on Great Jones Street in NYC’s NoHo neighborhood. He was just 27-years-old.

Among those speaking at Basquiat’s memorial service, attended by over 300 people from the art and music world, was the late, great Ingrid Sischy. Fab 5 Freddy read a poem by Langston Hughes. In his memory, Haring created Pile Of Crowns For Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Basquiat’s unique visual vocabulary, filled with graffiti symbols and urban rage, challenged accepted notions of popular art. His vivid paintings incorporated such diverse images as African masks, quotes from Leonardo di Vinci, Egyptian murals, pop culture icons, and jazz. The critics called his work childlike and menacing and neo-primitive.

Haring:

“Basquiat’s stuff I saw on the walls was more poetry than graffiti. They were sort of philosophical poems. On the surface they seemed really simple, but the minute I saw them I knew that they were more than that. From the beginning he was my favorite artist.”

Several major museum retrospective exhibitions of Basquia’s works have been held since his passing. The first was at the Whitney Museum in 1993. The show then traveled to museums in Texas, Iowa, and Alabama. Another major, influential exhibition was at the Brooklyn Museum in 2005.

In this decade, Basquait’s paintings have never been hotter. In 2015, Dustheads, a large painting of a black fisherman, sold at Christie’s in NYC for 49 million dollars. When Basquiat’s father died in 2013, hundreds of his son’s paintings were found at his home in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn.

As reported by World of Wonder’s own James St. James, in May, a Basquiat painting of a skull brought $110.5 million at auction at Sotheby’s, becoming the sixth most expensive work ever sold at auction. Only 10 other works have gone for over $100 million. It was purchased by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, founder of Japan’s large online fashion mall, Zozotown, who chose Instagram to announce that the painting was now his. The painting, titled Untitled, broke all records for a work by any American artist. Previously holding the record for the highest-selling painting by an American artist was Warhol’s Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster), which sold for $104.5 million.

Untitled, via YouTube

If you are interested in Basquait, and you really should be, check out the film Basquait (1996), directed by artist Julian Schnabel, with wonderful Jeffrey Wright playing Basquiat and David Bowie as Warhol. Or try the documentary, Jean-Michel Basquait: The Radiant Child, directed by Tamra Davis, available on PBS On Demand.

My friend, famed theatre designer William Fregosi, based the design of his stage set for the Suzan-Lori Parks play, Imperceptible Mutabilities In TheThird Kingdom, on Basquiat’s work. Fregosi:

“The playwright and the painter seemed to me to be completely complementary: she a dazzling writer whose work is filled with vibrant visual imagery; he a painter of brilliant, hard-hitting images whose work is full of text. It was one of my happiest production experiences.”

Photo from “Let’s Get Lost”, via YouTube

December 23, 1929– Chet Baker

Not many people came to Chet Baker’s funeral at a cemetery near LAX. His daughter hissed obscenities at her father’s last lover over the lowering coffin. The wife Baker hadn’t lived with for 15 years, stood up front in the beating sunlight with her arms clamped over her chest.

The thrill was gone, that funny valentine, that smooth, softly smoked voice, the lamentable sound of his trumpet. You fall in love with it. You can fall in love listening to it. For as long as his pure note lasted, everything Baker played was true. Yet, the music and the life don’t fit. No matter which version of his life you believe, the gap between the song and the facts sinks a hole in your heart.

Leaving the funeral, one woman warned: “Chet can hurt people even after he’s dead. Remember that.”

Chesney Henry Baker, Jr. was a trumpet player and singer with matinee idol good-looks, emotionally remote performances, and a well-publicized drug habit.

Born in small town Oklahoma, Baker moved with his musical family to Los Angeles when he was 10-years-old. He dropped out of high school when he was 16-years-old to join the U.S. Army where he played trumpet in the Army band in Europe. Back in the USA, Baker started sitting in at San Francisco Be-Bop jam sessions, while he was a member of the Presidio Army Band.

When he was 23-years-old, Baker joined the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, which was an instant phenomenon. The quartet’s version of Rodgers and Hart’s My Funny Valentine, featuring the now famous Baker solo, was a major hit, and it became the song with which Baker is still intimately associated. For me, it is the definitive version.

The quartet found quick success, but they lasted less than a year because Mulligan was arrested and sent to prison on drug charges. Baker went solo and in 1953, Pacific Jazz Records released his album Chet Baker Sings. In 1954, Baker was named the Downbeat Magazine Jazz Poll’s favorite musician. He was just 25-years-old and on his way to the big time.

Because of his handsome, chiseled good-looks, the Hollywood studios showed interest and approached Baker with acting work. He made his film debut in a war flick Hell’s Horizon (1955) starring the equally handsome John Ireland. With no irony, Baker portrayed a trumpet player. Yet, he preferred the jazz musician’s life on the road to making movies and declined an offer of a studio contract.

Photo from “Let’s Get Lost, via YouTube

Over the next few years, He became the icon of the West Coast Jazz sound, helped by his beautiful face and his stylish whisper of a singing voice. Baker:

“I don’t know whether I’m a trumpet player who sings or a singer who plays the trumpet.”

Baker was already a steady heroin user by this time and just as his star was rising, his musicianship began a decline as a result of the drugs. Sometimes, Baker would have to pawn his musical instruments to get the money to maintain his habit. In 1955, he made an eight month long European tour, at that point, the longest for an American Jazz artist ever.

Photo from “Let’s Get Lost”, via YouTube

Baker was arrested on drug charges repeatedly during those years, both in the USA and in Europe. In the early 1960s, he served more than a year in prison in Italy, and he was expelled from Germany and Britain. He settled in Northern California where he played music in small San Francisco clubs between his short jail terms served for prescription fraud.

In 1966, Baker was severely beaten after a gig in San Francisco. He sustained severe cuts on the lips and all his front teeth were broken and the attack left him nearly dead. He stopped performing for two years while he recovered and he turned to methadone to break his habit. From that time on, Baker had to learn to play trumpet with dentures.

In the 1970s, Baker returned to Europe and he began performing again. The critics praised his firmer tone and more aggressive solos. Starting in 1978, Baker resided in and played concerts almost exclusively in Europe, returning to the USA once a year for a few performance dates. 1978 to 1988 was Baker’s most prolific era as a recording artist, putting out at least an album a year.

In 1983, another of my favorite artists, Elvis Costello, a longtime fan of Baker, hired him to play a solo on his heartbreaking song Shipbuilding, from the album Punch The Clock. He was in my parental units’ record collection, but this was when I really discovered Baker and fell in love with his sound. The song was a top 40 hit. Later, Baker often featured Costello’s gorgeous ballad Almost Blue in his live sets, and he recorded the song for the soundtrack of Let’s Get Lost (1988), fashion photographer Bruce Weber’s excellent documentary film about Baker’s life.

In the early morning of May 13, 1988, Baker was found dead on the street below his second story room at Hotel Prins Hendrik in Amsterdam. Heroin and cocaine were found in his hotel room. His death was ruled an accident.

If you want to know this amazing musician, and you really should, watch Let’s Get Lost, which shows him as a cultural icon of the 1950s, juxtaposed with his later image as a broken-down junkie. The film, shot in stark black and white, includes a series of interviews with friends, associates and lovers, along with footage from Baker’s earlier life, with interviews with Baker near the end of his life.

Let’s Get Lost shows the fragile, faded Baker as the epitome of cool. It is made with elaborate and obvious effort. When Weber starts interviewing people who loved the musician not from afar, as he did, but from too close: his bitter wife, his girlfriends, his neglected kids, you see how tough being cool has been, how many drugs it took, how much willful indifference, how much loss of his self was in the pale frame of Baker. The film is powerful; it’s among the few documentaries that deal with the mysterious, complicated emotional cost involved in the creation of pop culture, and the ambiguous process by which performers generate desire.

David Wilcox’s song, My Old Addiction, is inspired by Baker’s life and music. I especially love k.d. lang’s version on her album Drag (1997).

Baker was the inspiration for the character played by Robert Wagner in the film All The Fine Young Cannibals (1960). Cutie pie Ethan Hawke plays Baker in the film Born To Be Blue (2015).

You should download some Baker recordings. With his breathy walking-on-eggshells trumpet tone, similar in sound to his achy, whispered, weathered, weary vocals, Baker delivers mournful takes on standards like Just Friends, Someone To Watch Over Me, and But Not For Me. Costello duets with Baker on blue, smoky versions of The Very Thought of You and You Don’t Know What Love Is. Baker recorded over 50 albums. Everyone should have at least some of his stuff in their collection.

I recommend that on New Year’s Eve, snuggle up with your sweetie, or even some stranger, next to the fireplace, pour some brandy, and put on Chet Baker Sings (1953) or Chet Baker Sings & Plays (1963).