The Brooklyn Rail

This exhibition is much more than the sum of its parts. Entering Gagosian’s Beverly Hills gallery to experience (or, in a couple of cases, re-experience) twenty-seven works produced by Jean-Michel Basquiat between 1982 and 1984 in Venice, California—reunited not too far east of where they were made, and even less west of where they were first shown—was not what I had anticipated. Made approximately forty years ago, the works didn’t trigger the level of nostalgia I expected, and they didn’t fit as comfortably into the historical “box” I had in mind. This might be because the material is just a bit before my time, as my first experience of seeing both Basquiat and his work was at the opening for what would become his last show in New York, at Vrej Baghoomian in 1988, just a few months before he died. However, I think my presumptions had more to do with the fact that this exhibition is not one that exists to lift the early work of an artist out of any ad-hoc, fugitive ways it might have been shown back in the day. It presents a sustaining rather than a sublimating situation, one that maintains the youthful spirit of the work that was equipped from the beginning to resist the worst aspects of the romanticization and dramatization that has been tacked onto it pretty much ever since.

As is demonstrated by the extensive historical documentation presented in vitrines in the second large room of the gallery, Gagosian has had great spaces from the beginning, spaces that would do complete justice to this work if they were still operational. Gagosian’s first show of the artist’s work, in April 1982 just after Basquiat’s debut solo at Annina Nosei in New York, presented paintings in a West Hollywood space that has housed several other important galleries over the years. Those paintings, however, were made in New York before Basquiat came to Venice to work in November 1982. Taken from the work periods in Venice between then and 1984, this current exhibition unpacks the crucial role that location plays in all aspects of it, even though it should be noted up front that the works do not represent any glaring break from what Basquiat had been producing in New York. Venice seems to have provided him and his work a change of pace, if not the classic change of light (in the first space, in Gagosian’s home, he worked under a very large skylight), while opening up the connective abilities of color, language, and rhythm to the distinctive sensibilities of Southern California.

Arguably the best-known painting included, Hollywood Africans (1983), makes the clearest connection with its title as well as some of the signature writing integrated across its surface: “MOVIE STAR FOOTPRINTS©,” “SEVEN STARS,” as well as the appending of “1940” to the title. The distinctiveness of its color—a predominant bright yellow seemingly painted over a sky blue that remains exposed in the lower right corner—has, obviously, always been present, but I think this is the first time I’ve seen it with other paintings from the same time and place. I know I’ve never before seen in person paintings like Pink Parker (1983) and Plastic Sax (1984), the most physically gnarly works included—they each have a section of photocopied paper partially ripped away and dangling off the canvas, making, in the latter, the repeated Japanese and English text and pictorial references to origami all the funnier—yet still related to the vibrant pastel hues that are ubiquitous in Los Angeles, especially near the ocean. (Fred Hoffman shares a great story in the catalogue about arriving for a visit to Basquiat’s studio to have the artist declare “Tonight, I’m going to paint the history of contemporary painting in California,” watching him proceed to take on the likes of Diebenkorn, Francis, and others, and then obliterate everything.)

The range of materials also add up and multiply the impact of the show. The old doors of Untitled (Self-Portrait) (1983) (including a doorknob, keyholes and hinges), and sections of wood fencing (taken from a patio behind the second Market Street studio) of works like Flexible, Gold Griot, and M (all 1984), remix the terms of Rauschenberg’s Combines with those of Ed Kienholz’s and Noah Purifoy’s assemblages, made in and around the city that has been considered to be the United States’s greatest junkyard. It’s the materiality that sticks, reinforced ultimately in this exhibition by all of the ways Basquiat made paper do the heavy lifting, even, or especially, when he adhered it to canvas. The acrylic paint on some of the canvases without collage does sometimes fall flat here (for example Horn Players and Untitled [both 1983]), but they are the exceptions that reinforce the lasting success of his accomplishments that from the beginning were built upon how stuff can provide a tangible and lasting reminder of place.