Basquiat review – the hungry chronicler of broken America

Barbican Art Gallery, London
This dazzling retrospective reveals the savage sweep of Jean-Michel Basquiat, an artist whose blood-spattered mouths and grinning human skulls captured the tragic arc of American history

If the brilliantly promising artist whose paintings delight and dazzle the eye and mind in this retrospective were still alive, he’d be celebrating his 57th birthday come December. What kind of middle-aged artist might Jean-Michel Basquiat make? It’s hard to imagine him getting any older than 27, the age when drugs took his life. It is like trying to picture a Van Gogh who never shot himself, a Keats who recovered from tuberculosis and lived to be poet laureate.

The young face of Basquiat looms large in this exhibition, in giant photographs and videos. He sits with Andy Warhol, who has his arm around his protege, in a clip from Warhol’s TV show. They talk about New York clubs, but what if the picture were reversed? Instead of an old Warhol embracing a young Basquiat, I’d like to see old man Basquiat dispensing advice to the young. More to the point, I think it might be good advice.

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