Raw materials

‘Art by its very essence is of the new… There is only one healthy diet for artistic creation: permanent revolution.’

Jean Dubuffet wrote those words in 1963, and when Jean-Michel Basquiat burst on to the New York art scene 20 years later — barely out of his teens, untrained and black — he seemed to embody them. Together with his friend Al Diaz, he had grabbed attention in the late 1970s with a campaign of cryptic graffiti signed SAMO© targeted on the SoHo gallery district. Born to middle-class Haitian-Puerto Rican parents in the South Bronx, Basquiat didn’t waste time tagging trains. He knew the value of location; his dad was an accountant.

Photographs of the graffiti fill a room in the Barbican’s exhibition Basquiat: Boom for Real. ‘SAMO© As An Alternative 2 ‘Playing Art’ With The ‘Radical? Chic’ Sect On Daddy’$ Funds’ reads one; ‘SAMO© As A Result Of Overexposure’ reads another. Later, after the Village Voice blows the pair’s cover, comes the announcement ‘SAMO© Is Dead’.

The death of SAMO© the graffitist marked the birth of Basquiat the artist. Soon the lanky kid who had once peddled postcards for a dollar outside MoMA was being invited to contribute to high-profile exhibitions: after showing in New York/New Wave in 1981 he was greeted by the critic Peter Schjeldahl as ‘a kind of street Dubuffet (who says he never heard of Dubuffet)’. Inevitably, he was taken up by Warhol, whom he wooed with a double-portrait, ‘Dos Cabezas’ (1982), in which Jean-Michel’s dreadlocks tangle with Andy’s fright wig. His artistic independence survived their subsequent collaboration, his youthful unselfconsciousness did not: in a photo taken in Zurich in 1982 the expression behind Basquiat’s dark glasses is a perfect replica of Warhol’s pained poker face.