Jean-Michel Basquiat

Music propels art in landmark Montreal show.

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If ever there was a jazz town to rival New Orleans, Montreal fits the bill. During Prohibition, Montreal’s clubs were full of Black musicians who ventured north simply for the work. Music lovers also came in droves from south of the border, joining locals at taverns like Rockhead’s Paradise and Café St-Michel. Some stayed, sparking a surge of jazz talent that included the likes of Oscar Peterson, Maynard Ferguson, Oliver Jones and Myron Sutton.

American neo-expressionist Jean-Michel Basquiat loved jazz and started frequenting the Manhattan clubs in the late 1970s after growing up in Brooklyn to Haitian American and Puerto Rican parents. He played in the noise band Gray and danced with indie rock artist Anna Domino at the Mudd Club. By the early 1980s, he was hanging out with Pop artist Keith Haring, heading to record stores for albums by Miles Davis, Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk. For Basquiat, music was like breathing. 

Montreal’s vibrant jazz scene is a good backdrop for what is billed as the first multidisciplinary show dedicated to exploring the role of music in Basquiat’s work. Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music, on view until Feb. 19 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, is only the second major show of his work in Canada, following the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Now’s the Time retrospective in 2015. The present show consists of some 100 works – all rife with written and visual references to jazz, hip-hop and rap. The show, likewise, features sound clips, film footage and archival materials. 

For Basquiat, whose work now sells for millions of dollars, the expansive atmosphere of music was an integral part of that era’s dynamic creative cross-fertilization, which he enacted first in the space of the street and, eventually, in the studio. The spirit of the time is captured in Polaroids by artist and designer Maripol that show Basquiat with various musicians – Debbie Harry, Madonna, Grace Jones, Sade, John Lurie and Fab 5 Freddy.

Jazz great Charlie Parker inspired works like Basquiat’s 1985 painting Now’s the Time, executed in a spare style with resonant mix of raw but readable text and visual symbols. Painted box assemblages, known as Basquiat’s Boxes, were exhibited in a 1985 group show at Area, a New York City club known for its party scene, under the name Klaustance, a Parker composition recorded in 1947. 

Basquiat’s friendship with Andy Warhol, immortalized in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 movie, Basquiat, stained the childlike purity of Basquiat’s creative process, as did the drugs he used. In Arm and Hammer II, a collaboration with Warhol, we see Basquiat taking Pop Art out of its commercial and aesthetic framing. Cut-ups and collages, even of Basquiat’s own drawings, move art far past Pablo Picasso or Juan Gris. And be it rap, hip hop or reggae, the musical rhythms carry over onto the space of the wall or the canvas – music as process begets art as process.

Basquiat’s remarkable scripting collapses the visual and verbal into a kind of anti-art. It spills over from the street graffiti he enacted until 1978 under the tag of SAMO©, in collaboration with Alf Diaz on the Lower East Side. Eroica I and Eroica II, a 1988 diptych named for Beethoven’s third symphony, was made the year Basquiat died, tragically young at 27, from a heroin overdose. The diptych offers a visual panorama of the phrases and phases that propelled Basquiat, from urban graffiti and hip hop to reggae and jazz. Words, fragments, misspellings, all cave-like with an art brut immediacy, can be read simply as inventive fragments – “Bagpipe: Vacuum Cleaner / Bale of Straw: White Blond Female / Ball & Chain: Wife” – but are slang culled from the writers and musicians he revered. 

Texts in the exhibition catalogue, published by Editions Gallimard, are compelling. An interview with American painter George Condo draws incisive parallels between Basquiat’s process and William Burroughs’ automatic writing and cut-up techniques, and likewise notes Basquiat’s interest in John Cage’s musical scores.

The places Basquiat visited, or hung around in, but never settled into entirely, testify to his artistic brilliance. His works are near-ancient expressions, rife with icon-loading, quasi-hieratic symbols and textual scripting. While the show is dense, and all over the place with both the art and the musical references, this is probably helpful for younger viewers. Seeing Loud goes a lot further than earlier Basquiat shows to contextualize the music and art so much a part of the New York scene in the late 1970s and 1980s. ■

Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts from Oct. 15, 2022, to Feb. 19, 2023. The show is organized in collaboration with the Musée de la musique de la Philharmonie de Paris, where it will be presented in 2023.

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