Julian Schnabel, New York painter, has turned to film. His subject? Fellow artist, the late Jean-Michel Basquiat. ROBERTA SMITH looks at his fascinating film – in which he twists history to suit his own ends
THE art world spent the Eighties getting used to reading about itself in glossy magazines. In the Nineties it may grow accustomed to seeing itself ascend to the big screen. Artists, their lives and their unconventional lifestyles appear to have increasing appeal in Hollywood, where movies about Frida Kahlo, Jackson Pollock and Robert Mapplethorpe are finished or in various stages of development. Carrington, about the painter Dora Carrington was released in 1995; Mary Harron’s I Shot Andy Warhol was screened last year.
As well as providing story-lines, artists – or at least several art stars from the Eighties – have begun to direct movies themselves. Robert Longo and David Salle made their directorial debuts in 1995 with, respectively, Johnny Mnemonic, a post- apocalyptic action movie, and Search and Destroy, a sardonic, expertly acted film that has the brittle self-consciousness and sophistication of Salle’s paintings. The photographer Cindy Sherman is at work on a horror movie to be released this year.
The two trends – artist as subject and artist as director – collide in Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat, possibly the first feature film about a painter to be directed by a painter. Basquiat is a romantic, partly fictionalised portrait of Jean- Michel Basquiat, the art sensation who died of a drug overdose in 1988 at the age of 27.
The movie traces the artist’s meteoric rise to fame, his affair with a beautiful young painter and waitress named Gina (Claire Forlani) and his edgy encounters with the white-dominated art world and some of its most prominent denizens. It deftly glosses over the seamier side of Basquiat’s existence, including the heroin habit that proved fatal. And, as might be expected from its director’s immense ego, the movie is as much about Schnabel as about Basquiat.
Basquiat is an ideal subject. Born in 1961 to a middle-class Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother, he grew up in Brooklyn and became an artist of international stature. He began his creative life as Samo, a graffiti artist who chalked poems and aphorisms on the walls of buildings. Switching to canvas – and other portable surfaces such as windows and doors – Basquiat devised a fusion of roughly drawn images and words and soon attracted fame.
He was also handsome, charismatic, stylish and, as a black prodigy, controversial. With its lists of black athletes and verbal homages to figures such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, his art often focused on the subject of black talent in white society.
In telling Basquiat’s story, Schnabel is helped by the performances of Jeffrey Wright in the title role, who conveys much of Basquiat’s physical magnetism and emotional opacity; David Bowie as an ethereal, disconnected Andy Warhol, who befriended Basquiat and collaborated with him; Gary Oldman as Albert Milo, a character based on Schnabel himself, and Michael Wincott as Rene Ricard, the critic and poet who helped establish Basquiat’s reputation.
Veterans of the art world will find Basquiat fascinating. For one thing, they will be able to tally what Schnabel has got right or wrong about Basquiat’s life and the Eighties art world. Schnabel remains true to the outline of Basquiat’s life and includes a number of vivid and accurate details, including the time he urinated in Schnabel’s stairway and an incident concerning overlapping girlfriends and a pink scarf. But, like most film-makers dealing with real events, he combines characters, compresses time and action and rearranges history to suit his purposes.
Milo’s paintings, which are actually Schnabel’s and which seem to be on screen as often as Basquiat’s, acquire a new chronology. Schnabel’s from the late Eighties and early Nineties are mixed with earlier efforts, implying a prodigious output; the effect is to create a mini- retrospective on film and also demonstrate that his lesser paintings make excellent movie props.
There are also moments so narratively tidy that they raise questions. Was it really Bruno Bischofberger (Dennis Hopper), the Swiss art dealer, who told Basquiat that his friend Warhol had died? Is it true that Basquiat’s mother, who suffered from depression, was confined to a mental hospital while her son rose to stardom?
More problematic is the film’s limited sense of the scope of the Eighties art scene. The movie suggests that during this hyperactive decade Basquiat, Warhol and Schnabel were the only artists in town. None of those to whom Basquiat was closest, aesthetically or personally, feature – neither Keith Haring nor Kenny Scharf, neither George Condo nor Francesco Clemente. Basquiat was an innovative artist, but he was also part of a generation of precocious talents who made the Eighties the bizarre, corrupt and exciting decade that it was, as well as the misunderstood and underestimated period it has become. Their presence fuelled his achievement and gave it a larger stage – one that is never visible in the film.
But there is the more interesting issue: of how a film directed by an artist relates to a larger and quite different body of visual work. For better and for worse, Basquiat places itself squarely in the middle of Schnabel’s multifaceted oeuvre. It may be the Gesamtskunstwerk – a total artwork – that his scattered talents have always sought, the fullest representation of his sensibility so far. After all, Schnabel is well known for his wide range of opinions – on books, film, music and fashion – and for his can-do-anything approach to life. He has already written an autobiography, cut a CD (possibly one of the worst in recording history) of his songs and is known for his idiosyncratic way with interior decor.
All of Schnabel’s interests are to be seen in Basquiat. He seems to have a hand in everything. Not only did he paint his own paintings, but also many of the imitation Basquiats. The interior of his current home appears as Milo’s domicile. There are cameos of his parents, his daughters and his second wife, most of them as Milo’s relatives. And while Schnabel doesn’t actually appear in the movie himself, the scene of Basquiat and Warhol collaborating at the Factory has as backdrop several silk-screen paintings that depict Schnabel as a young, lean man – paintings that Warhol never made.
Finally, as if to compensate for the CD, he has put together an excellent soundtrack, unblemished by Schnabel songs or Schnabel singing.
The director’s cut-paste-and-appropriate painting style and the casual panache with which he absorbs the extraneous into his work is also reflected in the movie. Snippets of other films are spliced into Basquiat, including bits of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and a wonderful Bosch-like sequence, showing a man dressed as a frog being devoured by a stork, made in Russia in 1923. When Schnabel wants to signal Basquiat’s aspirations, the artist is shown looking up toward the New York skyline, where the image of a lone surfer riding a wave appears behind the buildings. We know Basquiat’s drug habit is getting worse when the surfer wipes out.
The film’s rose-tinted, soft-focus romanticism is in keeping with a genuine sweetness, even a delicacy, that can be found in many of Schnabel’s best paintings. But there is also some of the metaphorical hyperbole that afflicts his worst. At the end of the movie, Basquiat tells of a young prince locked in a tower, who made a beautiful sound by banging his crown against the bars. The prince never got out of his cage, but, Basquiat says: ”That sound he made filled everything with beauty.”
Ultimately, the great thing about Schnabel is that he can’t help himself, which makes him tremendously vulnerable to error but inclined to trust his own instincts. In Basquiat, at least, those instincts are often well founded.
On display in the foyer of The Rosebank Mall cinema in Johannesburg are original works by Thomas Kgope and reproductions of Basquiat’s works from a new monograph. The film opens this Friday, April 18