Hail the king

For a long time we’ve had Duke Ellington and Count Basie. Now we have King Basquiat too.

This is not royalty-inflation. Jean-Michel Basquiat -- the artist whose trademark graphic icon was a toothy three-pointed crown, sometimes bestowed on references to his heroes and sometimes, like Napoleon, bestowed upon himself -- most certainly deserves it. The Duke had 75 years and the Count had 80 to cement their titles. But Basquiat died too young (at 27, famously from a heroin overdose) to develop a career that was more than the initial outpouring of an exceptionally fertile creative mind. Still, what he accomplished in the few years he had was more than just precocious.

What he did changed art. It changed the art world too.

At the Museum of Contemporary Art, the large and satisfying survey of Basquiat’s paintings and drawings that opened Sunday goes a long way toward making the contours of that contribution decipherable. The last retrospective, organized in 1992 by New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, was important in securing his reputation. Four years after his death, that was needed. The 1980s had turned upside down many standard presumptions about art. But that dizzying decade was over, and an art-market bust had followed the boom. Looking at the Whitney show, however, it was plain that Basquiat would last.

Looking at the current show, which was organized by the Brooklyn Museum, we begin to get a clearer idea why.

Basquiat, born into a middle-class Brooklyn family, had been a teenage tagger who went by the street-name Samo. Graffiti, love it or loathe it, is a compulsive scrawl across the implacable edifice erected by the establishment. Basquiat did something similar in his paintings and drawings. His work amounts to a bracing defacement of Conceptual art.

Conceptual art was the edifice the art world had erected, brick by brick, throughout the austere 1970s. It had successfully changed art’s emphasis, turning toward the idea and away from the object. Visual concerns were replaced by structures based in language. Social and political analysis trumped aesthetics. Asceticism trumped pleasure, casting it as decadent.

Perhaps most decisive was a change in venue. Advanced art, which had flourished largely on the margins of 20th century American life, moved into the academy. In the competitive world of the footnote-conscious university, theory and the idea-orientation of Conceptualism became tools of legitimization for art.

Basquiat short-circuited all that. The MOCA exhibition shows a gifted and ambitious kid gaily crossing two highly charged wires, each carrying its own electrical current. One is drawing, the other is color. Drawing and color -- historically regarded as incompatible or even residing on separate artistic planets -- are the only things that matter in Basquiat’s art.

Since the Renaissance, drawing (disegno) has most often been privileged over color (colore) by Western societies, whose commitment to business, science and industry tends to disregard art as frivolous. Drawing has clout because it’s graphic evidence of a mind at work in the artist’s hand.

Conceptual art renewed the prejudice favoring mind over matter. Basquiat’s brand of drawing takes full advantage of Conceptual art’s sense of freewheeling possibility, which is its principal legacy, often using language to boot. But there’s a difference. Even though Basquiat’s modern forebears include celebrated artists like Jean Dubuffet, Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly, his drawing style is a parody of intellectual pretension -- stock in trade of the academy.

Basquiat, who did not go to art school or college, scrawled and doodled like a relentless child. In his work a house is a box with a triangle on top. A face is a circle with two dots for eyes and a slash for a mouth. A crown is three triangles atop a rectangle.

Bodies don’t exist in a space of three dimensions, never mind four (including time). They’re flat and iconic instead, with torsos shown frontally and feet in profile.

Comic books are inspiration. In the place of Zen riddles and mystical koans, you’ll find Batman’s masked green nemesis demanding, “Riddle me this!” But the aim is the same -- temporarily jamming normal cognitive processing so that something more interesting can happen.

The meticulous analyses in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks and the layered, X-ray-like renderings of the human body in Gray’s Anatomy are also obvious incentives; you find references to both throughout Basquiat’s work. But they all display a visual vocabulary associated with a wholly untutored author. The drawings are fast, notational and stylishly crude.

Words are scattered at random, written in lists or clumped in blocks of text. Mostly it’s English, sometimes Spanish. (Basquiat’s mother, Mathilde, was Puerto Rican, and his family lived on the island in the 1970s.) Their meaning is found in the torrent of earnest enthusiasms the words represent (for music, sports, African American history and culture, the human body and the sensuality of touch) and the inference of sound (repetitions, rhymes, dissonance, glossolalia). Forget anything as highfalutin as ideas; pop culture rules.

Basquiat’s paintings are drawn as much as painted. As for color, however, I’m inclined to agree with Marc Mayer, the former Brooklyn curator (and now director of Montreal’s Museum of Contemporary Art), when he writes in the exhibition catalog that “color holds his pictures together, and through it they command a room.”

Color is often laid down in big patches, brushy but unmixed. In addition to brushes he used an oil stick -- paint mixed with enough wax so that it’s somewhat like a crayon -- and he also used the wooden tip of the brush to scrape into the paint, making a negative line. There’s no favored palette. Color is a graphic tool and a surface on which to draw.

Conceptual art typically downgrades color, partly because of its blaring associations with the commercial world. But it creates the perfect foil for Basquiat’s drawing style. Color is seductive and irrational. It scares people. (“Good taste” is beige.) Basquiat brandished it to further jam established art-circuits.

It worked too. The color Basquiat brought to art wasn’t just in his paintings, it was in his skin. As recently as 1982, when the painter exploded simultaneously onto the art scenes in New York, Los Angeles, Zurich and Rome, the established art world was lily white, not to mention heterosexual, closeted and male. For all of Conceptualism’s necessary social and political wrangling, which began to bubble up in the late 1950s, Basquiat understood that Pop is what possessed the power to change the actual landscape. That’s one reason he and his pal Andy Warhol -- 32 years his senior -- formed such a strong bond. Today an Afro-Puerto Rican-American artist wouldn’t turn a head. For that we have Basquiat’s acutely subversive art to thank.

In a downstairs gallery MOCA is showing a 20-minute film, shot mostly in Los Angeles in 1986 by director Tamra Davis (“Gun Crazy,” “Billy Madison”) but only recently completed. Basquiat talks about his art and is shown working in his Venice studio. He’s shockingly young -- 25 -- sly, stylish and charismatic. Apparently the only recorded interview with the artist, and never shown in public before, the film is revealing for the seamlessness with which he talks and paints. In both he’s like a dancer, loose-limbed but focused.

If you go to MOCA expecting room after room of superlative masterworks, you will be disappointed. Basquiat’s output was large and uneven. He started out slow, and it is essential to remember that he was barely past his teen years when he painted the jangling, disjointed, largely unsuccessful pictures in the show’s first galleries.

And he died before he reached an age when most artists have gained confidence and consistency. This might be a full retrospective, but it barely covers seven years.

No matter. There are remarkable paintings here. The “return of painting” that the early 1980s tumultuously brought us left few memorable artists in its immediate wake. King Basquiat is one of them.

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‘Basquiat’

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Mondays and Fridays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays; 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays

Ends: Oct. 10

Price: $5 to $8

Contact: (213) 626-6222; www.moca.org