Aesthetic: Basquiat's Art and Marilyn Monroe's Fashion Evolution

Every now and then, I like to focus on inspirations.

I cannot for the life of me sleep through the night...It's always 5 hours here, 4 hours there, and then a couple hours of being wide-awake-but-too-exhausted-to-not-go-back-to-sleep.  In the summer, I curtail this insomnia by going for a run by the East River, but it's winter-dark and freezing, and I see no reason to go outside.

So I write, if I feel inspired to chip away on my novel, or read aesthetic books that are somehow inspirational, such as Marilyn Monroe in Fashion.

Excerpt from Marilyn Monroe in Fashion

Or I watch documentaries.  I saw a really great one over the weekend:  Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child. It came out in 2010 and you can view it on Netflix.

In the film, we see Basquiat encountering art dealers, collectors, club kids, critics and hangers-on. He turns up in Page Six items and keeps huge stacks of cash lying around his Crosby Street loft because he didn’t have a bank account. He’d paint barefoot in Armani suits and go out clubbing in the same paint-splattered clothes.

By the late 80’s, heroin choked his paintings. The words “man dies” are written repeatedly, next to the words “from narcotics” in Eroica II, in 1988. Several interviews suggest that Basquiat’s intense grieving after the death of his close friend, Andy Warhol, led to his decline into drugs and obsession with death. He stopped painting and distanced himself from his friends. Basquiat spent the last New Year’s Eve of his life –- 1987 -– drinking alone at a bar.

One of my favorite Basquiat quotes is:  "Believe it or not, I can actually draw."

As the documentary synopsis states:

Centered on a rare interview that director and friend Tamra Davis shot with Basquiat over twenty years ago, this definitive documentary chronicles the meteoric rise and fall of the young artist. 

 In the crime-ridden NYC of the 1970s, he covers the city with the graffiti tag SAMO. In 1981 he puts paint on canvas for the first time, and by 1983 he is an artist with “rock star status.” He achieves critical and commercial success, though he is constantly confronted by racism from his peers. 

In 1985, he and Andy Warhol become close friends and painting collaborators, but they part ways and Warhol dies suddenly in 1987. Basquiat’s heroin addiction worsens, and he dies of an overdose in 1988 at the age of 27. 

The artist was 25 years old at the height of his career, and today his canvases sell for more than a million dollars. 

With compassion and psychological insight, Tamra Davis details the mysteries that surround this charismatic young man, an artist of enormous talent whose fortunes mirrored the rollercoaster quality of the downtown scene he seemed to embody.

Featuring interviews with Julian Schnabel, Larry Gagosian, Bruno Bischofberger, Tony Shafrazi, Fab 5 Freddy, Jeffrey Deitch, Glenn O'Brien, Maripol, Kai Eric, Nicholas Taylor, Fred Hoffmann, Michael Holman, Diego Cortez, Annina Nosei, Suzanne Mallouk, Rene Ricard, Kenny Scharf, among many others.

An old-school New York friend of mine once told me: "I knew Basquiat back in the day. He used to come by this restaurant I managed, Bar Lui. He would just stand around and stare at people."

I think the most interesting thing I took away from from film was when his former girlfriend said, "He was always working.  Even if people were visiting, he never stopped painting."

That's how it's done...Discipline is paramount.