Jean-Michel Basquiat: Made on Market Street at Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills Explores a Vital Missing Chapter of Art History

By LITA BARRIE May 27, 2024 

Made on Market Street addresses an extremely important chapter in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s life and work when he stayed in Los Angeles between 1982 and 1984 as Larry Gagosian’s guest.  Basquiat really came into his own in L.A., and this museum quality exhibition finally corrects an historical oversight by showing 27 artworks from this period which have never been shown together before.  

These major artworks are on loan from both public and private collections, as well as the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, including some which are worth over $100 million in today’s art market – but they are not for sale at the gallery. Also included in this show is extensive archival material from that period, displayed in vitrines (which include press clippings, plane tickets, hotel bills, and art supply receipts), and this makes Market Street unlike any exhibition that has ever been staged in a private gallery. Only co-curators Larry Gagosian and Fred Hoffman possessed the personal knowledge of Basquiat, art world connections and financial resources to pull it off.

Larry Gagosian and Jean-Michel Basquiat c. 1982.

 

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Made on Market Street, 2024, installation view, Artwork © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York, Photo: Jeff McLane, Courtesy Gagosian.
 

Hoffman told me that “this exhibition adds to other major Basquiat exhibitions, and hopefully will help correct the much-overlooked fact that many of Jean-Michel’s most important works were created here in Los Angeles.” Although the Basquiat artworks in this exhibition were made four decades ago, they are still ahead of their time because they have a raw power and emotional depth that is almost never seen. As Gagosian said in the Spring 2024 issue of Gagosian Quarterly, Basquiat “had something that doesn't come along but once in a lifetime.”

To see these Basquiat artworks together in one space for the first time is so phenomenal, the exhibition has consistently attracted crowds since opening night when hoards stood in a long line down the block and Hollywood celebrities, superstar artists, critics, curators and major collectors crowded together. This incomparable exhibition continues to be the talk of the town because a museum-quality Basquiat exhibition of this magnitude staged in a private gallery has never happened before and will likely never happen again, because the cost of the loans, transportation and insurance is too prohibitive. The only other comparable exhibition is Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure (2022 - 2023) organized and curated by the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, with his sisters at the helm as co-administrators.
 

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Made on Market Street, 2024, installation view, Artwork © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York, Photo: Jeff McLane, Courtesy Gagosian.
 

Gagosian first saw Basquiat’s paintings at Annina Nosei’s gallery in SoHo in 1981. He immediately purchased three of them, and offered Basquiat a solo show – recognizing immediately, just as Nosei had, that he was creating an entirely new way of painting. The show opened at Gagosian’s North Altamont Drive gallery just one month after Nosei’s New York exhibition, and was the first West Coast solo show of Basquiat’s work. It received rapturous reviews, because nobody had ever seen such vigorous Neo-expressionism combined with the iconography of skulls, arrows, daggers, emblematic animals, scales, bones, stick figures, cartoon faces and discursive notations that made such ferocious political statements.

 As timing would have it, Basquiat was ready for a change of scenery because there was a lot of pressure on him in New York. Gagosian offered him the ideal solution by inviting him to live and work in the basement studio in his new residence – an award-winning, three-story architectural building by Studio Works on Market Street in Venice. 

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Made on Market Street, 2024, installation view, Artwork © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York, Photo: Jeff McLane, Courtesy Gagosian.
 

Over the next two years, Basquiat spent two extended periods in the L.A. area: first, living with Gagosian for almost a year on Market Street, then returning in 1983 to do more work at a studio just a few doors away, while he stayed at L’Ermitage Hotel in Beverly Hills. Basquiat worked hard and played hard, but more than anything, he came to L.A. to make artwork. Although he stayed out late in L.A. clubs as a regular in the music scene, these social experiences inspired the following day’s work in his studio, and he made over 100 paintings, countless works on paper and six silkscreen print editions. He worked on multiple canvases – moving from one to another – listening to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and surrounded by books on da Vinci and Cy Twombly catalogs. He kept a mattress in the corner to rest on, and for friends like filmmaker Tamra Davis, who directed Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (2010). Gagosian and Mike Kelley would watch him paint, and collectors like Herbert Schorr and Madonna, who was his girlfriend at the time, would stop by to hang out. 

Basquiat was introduced to esteemed scholar, dealer and publisher Hoffman by Gagosian, who suggested they collaborate on a series of silkscreen prints using Hoffman’s new printing company, New City Editions. Hoffman helped Basquiat translate his spontaneous combinations of drawing, collage and painting into large-scale prints like Tuxedo (1982), one of the intriguing features of this exhibition. Basquiat used a photography transfer, so that the silkscreen of the original printed in reverse to make the black dominant. Basquiat’s signature crown motif is white atop handwritten texts and pointing arrows. This work questions the cultural assumptions that underlie the construction of racial identity, and includes condensed notations filled with historical high culture references to Leonardo da Vinci, the sacking of Rome, Pope Alexander VI, and explorer Vasco da Gama, counterposed with contemporary low culture references to slot machines, pork ribs and cheese popcorn. 

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Tuxedo, 1982, Silkscreen on canvas, 102 1/4 x 60 inches (260 x 152.4 cm) Edition of 10, Private collection, Los Angeles © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York, Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio, Courtesy Gagosian.
 

Basquiat became such close friends with Hoffman that he even painted his portrait in a collage work featured in this exhibition, Fred (1983), which has the phrase “FINISHED PRODUCT” in capital letters in the center. Indeed, they became so close that Hoffman even named his son Jean-Michel, and later wrote four books on Basquiat. Hoffman introduced Basquiat to Robert Rauschenberg who was working at Gemini Gel, the publisher of prints, because he was a huge influence on Basquiat’s use of wooden doors and discarded materials found on the street.  

Throughout the exhibition are handwritten references to market commodities, value and “legal tender,” while references to L.A. are more subtle, with occasional palm trees and swatches of sunshine yellow paint. Basquiat’s best-known work, Hollywood Africans (1983) is the most optimistic work in the exhibition, with predominant yellow eclipsing the sky blue in one corner with repeated references to “Hollywood Africans” sometimes crossed out, “MOVIE STAR FOOTPRINT ©”, “SEVEN STARS” and “1940.”  The bright color composition is offset by sections painted black with notations of “gangsterism,” “TOBACCO,” and “200 YEN.” This is the first time this masterpiece has been shown alongside other work from the same place and time.

The centerpiece of Market Street is a trio of paintings from 1984: Flexible, Gold Griot, and M, featuring depictions of sub-Saharan deity figures with aggressive bared teeth and glaring eyes, which are both regal and scary as hell. They are painted on remnants of an old deteriorated wooden fence that had enclosed his studio. The divine power of the figures is accentuated by the sharp contrast with the salvaged materials.

This range of materials – like the old doors used in Untitled (Self Portrait) (1983), which also include a doorknob, hinges and keyholes – are a remix of references to Rauschenberg’s influential Combines, as well as quintessential L.A. artists Ed Kienholz and Noah Purifoy’s assemblage works. However, Basquiat’s L.A. artworks have a greater emphasis on repurposing found materials, which is the hallmark of Southern California’s most innovative art. This exhibition reveals the way Basquiat entered into an intense dialogue with the L.A. art world’s power brokers, art historians, collectors, artists and musicians – and this proved pivotal to his artistic life, helping him reach the peak of his power as an artist.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Made on Market Street, 2024, installation view, Artwork © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York, Photo: Jeff McLane, Courtesy Gagosian.
 

Many lesser artists have tried to imitate Basquiat’s pictorial touch by copying his textured, expressive style, iconography, notation and scribbles but no one has come close, as this exhibition makes obvious. Basquiat can write a word on paper and misspell it, cross it out and write it again and it is amazing art. Why? Because there is no filtering between his unconscious mind and his hand – which makes Basquiat’s mark-making and style unmistakable. His work has a fluidity fueled by passion, ferocity, and the assuredness of knowing exactly what he is doing that simply cannot be imitated.

Basquiat was no savant, nor did he rise up from the street as mistakenly believed from urban legends. He grew up in a middle-class home with an immigrant Haitian accountant father and a Puerto Rican mother who took him to New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum, and even gave him a copy of Gray’s Anatomy to study anatomical drawing, which became a lifelong influence. Basquiat knew he had a gift and no time to waste. His meteoric rise as an art world sensation and his early death was like the arc of a shooting star. As Lao Tzu said, “the flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long.” Indeed, Basquiat created a lifetime of works in only ten short years. His larger-than-life story has the mythological quality of a tragic hero born with exceptional gifts who was both revered and victimized by racial prejudice, because although important doors were opened for him by top art world power brokers who recognized his brilliance immediately, others considered him too young, too black, too beautiful, too charismatic, too political and too nonconformist to have so much early fame and fortune. But today, Basquiat – who always saw himself in the lineage of great artists – is one of the most celebrated and iconic artists of the 20th century. This important exhibition fills in a vital missing chapter in the art historical canon, allowing Basquiat devotees to have a sensate experience of the incomparable energy of his work, which must be experienced in person. 

On view March 7, 2024 through June 8, 2024. WM