ART / CATHY CURTIS : A Bit of Basquiat : Meaning More Important Than Style in 11 ‘Blue Ribbon’ Works From ’84 at Newport Harbor

Jean-Michel Basquiat would be the hero of young taggers, if they’d ever heard of him.

Born into a middle-class Brooklyn family in 1961 (his mother’s people came from Puerto Rico; his accountant dad was born in Haiti), the black artist started off spraying aphorisms, signed “SAMO,” on New York City subway cars in the late ‘70s. He continued painting on doors, refrigerators and cardboard boxes at friends’ apartments, made the East Village club scene, played in a “noise” band, showed at alternative gallery spaces, and developed a taste for addictive drugs.

Then he got signed up by a top art dealer, wore expensive suits (even to paint in), participated in the prestigious “Documenta 7” exhibition in Kassel, Germany, produced a rap record, exhibited in the 1983 Whitney Biennial, became a friend of Andy Warhol (who mentioned him 111 times in his diaries), hooked up with a different top art dealer, broke with her, made the cover of the New York Times magazine, pumped up his heroin habit--and died from a drug overdose at age 27 in 1988.

In his brief heyday, Basquiat was the darling of contemporary-art collectors who admired his willful combinations of painterly energy, high-keyed color, crudely drawn imagery and mysterious flurries of lettering, which reflected the vogue for graffiti art.

A painting by Basquiat scooped up the hollowness and brute rage at the edges of pop culture and served it up--fit for an upper-middle-class family’s living room--in the recognizable forms of Abstract Expressionism.

One bicoastal couple who went to Basquiat’s studio to buy 11 untitled works from a 1984 series, “The Blue Ribbon,” has loaned them to the Newport Harbor Art Museum, where they’re on view through Sept. 12.

Needless to say, this small exhibition--which is discussed only in general terms by a brief wall text half-hidden behind the museum admissions desk--is a far cry from the Basquiat retrospective of more than 90 works organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York last fall (that show is at the Des Moines Art Center through Aug. 15 and not scheduled for any West Coast venues).

But it is good to be able to study Basquiat’s much-praised, much-damned style first-hand, apart from the swirl of gossip and innuendo that surrounded his fabled rise and fall.

Combining the immediacy of acrylic paint and oil stick with the duplicative properties of silk screening (an uptown replacement for the artist’s earlier use of Xeroxed imagery), the 11-piece “Blue Ribbon” series is less captivating on a visual level than the eye-popping paintings that brought the artist his celebrity.

While Basquiat’s highly visual use of language in other works may suggest such innocuously jazzy antecedents as the paintings of American Cubist artist Stuart Davis, in this show, meaning ultimately seems more important than style. The paintings are variations on a theme that runs through Basquiat’s oeuvre: The troubled status of the black man in a white culture.

During Basquiat’s lifetime, critics tended to deal with his work in strictly formal ways. He was praised for the suavity of his compositional sense and his lyrical use of gesture, and--in language that now seems unbearably, if unintentionally, racist--for his “primitivism.”

Basquiat’s detractors, on the other hand, saw him little more than a dumb graffiti artist crowned by the novelty-seeking hip art world.

Last November, New Yorker critic Adam Gopnik opined that even Basquiat’s style was a bore--that “the ‘African’ masks, the coarse, zappy line, the scarifications, the scribbling intensity” amount to no more than “primitive cliches” used for decades by white artists.

The question of artistic vocabulary is a provocative one.

Don’t worthy artists normally tap into the enormous body of pre-existing, even “cliched” images and styles, to express their personal ideas?

For Basquiat, African masks were not just intriguing shapes or fascinatingly “exotic” objects. At a time when he was surrounded by white boosters and hangers-on, such imagery may have been among his only links to his own people and his own past.

Most prominent among the images in the “Blue Ribbon” canvases is a princely figure, a black or brown head wearing a crown. The figure’s features are sometimes mutilated or obliterated with a thick white stroke of paint, and the skin is often patchy or transparent.

Writing in the November 1992 issue of Artforum, Thomas McEvilley described the crown--which appears in many other works by Basquiat--as the symbol of “a royal selfhood somehow lost but dimly remembered, overlaid by a voodoo mask.”

McEvilley proposed that the image be viewed in a mythical light, as the portrait of a noble figure whose ancestors were wrenched from their homeland by the slave trade, and who is now doomed to wander through a fragmented, apocalyptic Western civilization.

In the June 1993 issue of Art in America, writer Bell Hooks suggested that the crown signifies Basquiat’s “bitter critique of his own longing for fame.” Hooks also views the skeletal quality of Basquiat’s images of black people as representing “the violent erasure of a people, their culture and traditions.”

Other components of the paintings include: anatomical drawings, lists (with dates and other data) of old Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny cartoons, a cartoon figure igniting a vat of TNT (labeled “black powder”), a Pabst Blue Ribbon beer logo, fragments of an absurd yet nefarious cartoon plot (“vehement alley cats garbed a la Ku Klux Klan plan to torture them” , diagrams of planetary orbits and the interior of the Great Pyramid, drawings of Napoleon’s hat, an African mask and a blocky seated figure that might be an African sculpture of a deity.

It may be tempting to write off the dense and feverish content of Basquiat’s works as a mindless, “garbage in, garbage out” Information Age exercise, or the babblings of a guy who didn’t get enough sleep or enough time off from chemical mind-warp.

Yet encoded within the seeming randomness of Basquiat’s writing and imagery is a bleak lack of trust in systems--however superficially benign--that fuel or reflect power struggles and racist attitudes or are connected in some way with African memories.

Basquiat became fascinated with “Gray’s Anatomy” as a child, when he was hospitalized after an accident; his first portfolio of prints was called “Anatomy.”

Hooks suggests that the artist’s ubiquitous use of bone imagery is linked to the art of the Masai of Kenya and Tanganyika, who believe that skeletal traces “become the repository of personal and political history.”

In addition to such obvious African imagery as masks, Basquiat’s invocation of fragments of imagery and language may be linked with the verbal traditions of African mythology.

The Yoruba culture of Nigeria (a culture that slaves brought to Haiti) is extremely rich in riddles, proverbs, “praise names,” songs, divining verses, myths, legends, curses and incantations (which, interestingly enough, need not be understood by the speaker in order to be effective).

Perhaps there was also a link in Basquiat’s mind between African tales featuring animal tricksters--Br’er Rabbit is the one best known to Americans--and the wily inventions of Warner Bros. cartoonists.

The essential Africanness of Basquiat’s art is only now becoming widely discussed; perhaps someday his place in American art will no longer be judged in terms of his life as an art star.

It’s no secret that the art world runs on hefty doses of quid pro quo . One might wonder why the couple who owns this suite of paintings--and who recently became Newport Harbor members--decided to exhibit them publicly for the first time at this particular moment. After all, museum exhibitions lend stature to works of art, and as everyone knows, the art market is in the doldrums.

In the mid-’80s, Basquiat’s paintings sold for between $10,000 and $25,000 to top museums and powerhouse collectors. During his final years--despite widespread criticism of his work as slipshod and drug-impaired--his paintings fetched between $32,000 and $99,000 at auctions.

The market was still on a roll when he died, and--as is common when an artist ceases production--his work became more valuable. In 1990 and ‘91, top prices for his paintings in the international market reached just under $600,000.

Since then, Basquiat’s prices have fluctuated quite a bit. Last fall, when the Whitney show prompted a flock of collectors to consign their Basquiats for sale, his painting “Jughead” managed to bring $187,000 at a Christie’s auction. In May, a Basquiat painting sold for $77,300, and a work combining paint with silk screening had no takers at all.

Certainly, viewers benefit when the owners of works of art allow them to be seen in public venues.

But once again, Newport Harbor has gone to a single source--in this case, a collector rather than a gallery--for a small exhibition about a “large” artist. (Three of the four pieces in the Nam June Paik show earlier this summer were loaned by one Los Angeles dealer.)

Is it too much to ask, even in a cash-poor era, that in-house shows be organized with adequate documentary material and a perspective broader than the lure of a famous name and a back-scratch for potential donors?

* “Jean-Michel Basquiat” remains through Sept. 12 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday, Fridays until 8 p.m. $4 adults, $2 students and seniors. Free for children under 12, and for everyone on Tuesdays. (714) 759-1122.