Tamra davis interview with basquiat untitled boxer

Some of the largest crowds at the Jean- Michel Basquiat retrospective at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art can be found in the museum’s basement reading room viewing Tamra Davis’s previously unreleased interview A Conversationwith Jean-Michel Basquiat. The twenty- minute video is mesmerizing. Basquiat
is charismatic, intelligent, and coy as he speaks on such issues as his childhood, feelings of alienation, and current art world success. Yet, when one listens closely to the interview, Basquiat deliberately obfuscates and exaggerates. As the artist admits at the outset of the interview, “I don’t think its good to be honest in interviews. It is better to lie.” It is with such candor that Basquiat proves to be both more and less than his myth. The works in the retrospective, and their installation at MOCA, bears this out.

The prominence of the Basquiat myth can lead to overly biographical readings of the artist’s work. Much scholarship on the artist revolves around Basquiat’s life—his race and activities. The stories of the artist’s mercurial rise from homelessness to art stardom, his struggle with drug addiction, and his tragic overdose at the age of 27 create an image of the artist as martyr (an updated Van Gogh or Pollock). Fellow painter Julian Schnabel’s su

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Jean-Michel basquiat:

Los Angeles

Spring 2024 Issue

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, trip over with producer Tamra Statesman, art undisclosed Larry Gagosian, and father and steward Fred Histrion to show on their experiences confront the person in charge during say publicly 1980s unswervingly Los Angeles.

Jean-Michel Basquiat affront his apartment at 21 Market Way, Venice, Calif., spring 1984. Photo: Brad Branson

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Jeanine Herivea

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Portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat in St. Moritz, Switzerland, 1983. Photo by Lee Jaffe/Getty Images.

Jean-Michel Basquiat wasn’t a fan of interviews, and on the rare occasions he surrendered to them, his responses were terse—even cryptic. Despite this, the painter’s words reveal a great deal about his inspirations and his all-consuming process. They offer a window into his approach, in which he remixed references from art history, the streets of 1980s New York, and the tumult of pop culture with his Carribean heritage and his identity as a young black man.

In a unique television interview with ART/new york from early 1981, when Basquiat was 21 years old, curator Marc H. Miller asked the painter where the poetic smattering of words scrawled on his canvases came from. Standing in front of his 1983 masterpiece Notary, he answered succinctly: “Real life, books, television.” When pressed for more, he acknowledged the importance of spontaneity to his practice: “When I’m working I hear them, you know, and I just throw them down,” he said of the words.

But Basquiat’s work was also deeply thoughtful—the products of his ravenous observations of the world around him. “I don’t think about art while I work,” he told writer Isabelle Graw in 198