He's the One

Jean-Michel Basquiat takes center stage as the focus of the far-reaching One Film program.

by A.D. Amorosi

Evan M. Lopez

Jean-Michel Basquiat is an iconic thing — throughout his lifetime and 20 years after his death in 1988 at age 27.

The New York Neo-Expressionist found the divining line between modern primitivism, graffiti and punk-funk, fashioning himself into an edgy art star who flamed out courtesy the usual excesses.

It makes for a great story that oddly has so far had just two tellers: journalist Phoebe Hoban, author of 1998's Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (Penguin, $18), and Julian Schnabel, director of 1996's Basquiat, which is this year's selection for the Free Library's One Film program.

The One Film media education program (running until March 11), like its sister program One Book, finds a flick that Philadelphians can watch and discuss within the confines of the Free Library. In Basquiat, the One Film program found something they can split into discussions regarding contemporary art/graffiti, drug use, race, class and the art of filmmaking. While the film will be screened throughout the city, Hoban will speak at the Free Library about Basquiat on Saturday.

Schnabel made the African-American painter into a comrade, competitor and a lost man-child in his film debut. Hoban studied Basquiat, essayed his every move and found him to be an "angry young man" willing to make necessary Faustian bargains for fame, only to get burned in the end. To most critics, and to the film's star, Jeffrey Wright, Schnabel's first cinematic work was as much about Schnabel as it was Basquiat. It looked at Basquiat as naïve, trivialized his relationships with lovers and artists and displayed the art world dialogue as corny. Still it had an eccentric spark.

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"I never thought Basquiat was a great movie, but it was a rescue mission," Schnabel told me while in town promoting The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, about having to buy back a lousy script from an unscrupulous producer. To Schnabel, Basquiat's cinematography was limited and David Bowie's portrayal of Warhol was marked by "that funny English accent." It didn't matter. "It's like [director] Josef von Sternberg said when criticized for something of his not being reality. He said "Of course it's not. It's much better than that."

Hoban's account of the Basquiat story doesn't jibe with Schnabel's vision because Schnabel's was just that — his vision.

"I think it's a wonderful film," says Hoban. "That said, I think it's an interpretation. It's an interpretation of one artist of another."

The New York-based scribe — currently finishing a biography on Pennsylvania artist Alice Neel — is clearly invested in the multilayered existences of passionate iconic painters. Her detailed reportage certainly reads as such as she treks confidently and exhaustively through the daring aesthetic and uneasy detritus of Basquiat's life.

Hoban never met Basquiat. But her reporting revealed a real Jean-Michel who was angrier and edgier than the cinematic one.

"Schnabel sees him as a sacrificial lamb," states Hoban. "Basquiat was not naïve. He was less sophisticated than some of the art-world powers that he dealt with and certainly didn't know the market that well. But he wanted to be famous and was willing to pay a certain price."

To her, Basquiat was no babe in the woods, not the sweet guy who lived in a cardboard box. "He knew what was going on," she says.

While Schnabel's film is incredibly accurate in its anecdotal details — who said what when in what restaurant while wearing whom — the director/painter/landlord's vision of Basquiat as a timidly soft-spoken Rimbaud man-child/outsider artist sways the viewer.

"Schnabel actually knew him; not as best buds but they hung out," says Hoban. There was competition and friendship between the two. There wasn't something diabolical in Schnabel creating what Hoban calls "a personal artistic vision and not a biographical one. ... It's that Basquiat was just not a victim."

Despite their differences, Hoban's book and Schnabel's film are both eloquent pictures of a man with that Hendrix-Van Gogh éclat — that die-young, stay-pretty ideal where the subject's charisma, intelligence, talent and appetite for destruction are equitable with his legacy (and his outputs' prices at auction) intact. Together their works present the 360 degrees of Basquiat. Or do they? As Hoban says, "All those things put together don't necessarily tell us who Basquiat really was."

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

One Film | Talk by author Phoebe Hoban, Sat., Feb. 28, 2 p.m., free, Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-567-4341, freelibrary.org. Check the Repertory Film listings for screenings.