Review: Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat’s notebooks shed new light on work

Bottom line: An emphasis on language defines this engaging exhibition of folk hero artist Jean-Michel Basquiat's work.

Jean-Michel Basquiat is the kind of beloved, revered artist who continues to inspire fresh crops of art school graduates. His crossed-out and purposefully misspelled text, imagery beholden to tribal art and graffiti culture and naif style married to a keen intelligence can be seen in any number of artists’ work who have taken his distinctive lexicon to heart, gulped it down and spit it out in new form.

There’s something in Basquiat’s story — his rise to fame in the wild style ’80s Manhattan art world, his self-taught artwork and his downfall, too, from a drug overdose at 27 — that appeals to a national fascination with doomed geniuses and folk heroes whose rise is as meteoric as their fall. Basquiat remains a special inspiration to artists of color for his talent, but also for his commentary on race and an authenticity that has echoed through the decades since his death.

A fitting homage to Basquiat's enduring mystique, "Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks," which originated at the Brooklyn Museum, and stops at the High Museum through May, brings together eight of the artist's notebooks produced between 1980 and 1987 and filled with Basquiat's acrobatic, playful use of language. The gritty, atmospheric film "Downtown 81" of Basquiat writing graffiti in downtown New York featuring the artist's band Gray, and a selection of drawings and paintings round out the exhibition and show the unique Basquiat bricolage of text and image that became his signature.

Centered on pages from the plain black-and-white composition books many of us remember from grade school, displayed in long white vitrines, the exhibition is a peek into one artist’s creative process, and also an intimate fan’s portrait of a roving and imaginative mind. While paintings and drawings are certainly indelible expressions of their maker’s hand, there is something that feels more personal, secretive, intimate even, in handwriting and the expression of thoughts distilled in wordplay and observation.

Basquiat’s notebooks are a fascinating mix of grocery lists, phone numbers, canny riffs on downtown squalor and the pretensions of the New York art world of the go-go-go 1980s, expressions of angst and playfulness, shrewd insight and jaundiced observation. There are pages devoted to a single word, lists of the famous (David Lynch, Pee Wee, Ali, Miles Davis) and also stinging, funny word associations printed out in the artist’s precise, all-cap handwriting, like “Love is a Lie/Lover=Liar.” A literary seer in addition to a rare visual talent, Basquiat made wordplay his muse.

That Basquiat incorporated language into his collaged paintings and sculptures is a well-known feature of his work, but placed beside his notebooks, the primacy of language is made all the more clear.

Evidence of that puree of words and incisive observation, his very funny “All Beef” is an exceedingly clever takedown of American consumer culture a la Warhol (a frequent collaborator). In the two-sided painting on panel, the artist creates a mock advertisement with a crusty-looking cartoony mascot in a work whose amusingly crude delivery captures the simplistic, button-pushing goading of advertising itself.

Like his language, Basquiat’s drawings were often filled with terse, punchy humor as in “Bar” (1981), in which an urban watering hole is represented with a vertical line to signal a wall, a crosshatch window and the word “Bar” in the shorthand semiotics of adult refreshment.

Relying so heavily on the exploratory, cerebral side of his creativity, “Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks” feels as much about the artist’s personality and sensibility as it is about his art, and for that reason, this deep dive may be of most interest to students or fans of his work.