Appropriately, six months after a devastating earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, a documentary by Tamra Davis about an artist of Haitian descent premiered Wednesday night in New York. It is so apropos because we’ve all become accustomed to thinking of Haitians as stewards to a Third World nation. Long before the Earth shook that tiny country off its foundations, we here in the bosom of the riches of the United States had come to regard the place as a lost cause with nary a thing of value to offer. While our hearts may have been wrenched at the sight of what became of the country on January 12^th, hardly any of us looked on and thought the world had lost one of its sources of creativity and artistry. Ms. Davis and her film about her friend remind us we were wrong. Her friend’s father was Haitian. Her friend was Jean-Michel Basquiat.

To Whites every Black holds a potential knife behind the back, and to every Black the White is concealing a whip. We were born into this dialogue and to deny it is fatuous. Our responsibility is to overcome the sins and fears of our ancestors and drop the whip, drop the knife.

– René Ricard, The Radiant Child, 1981

From 1977 until early 1980 a teenaged Basquiat, along with equally youthful collaborators Al Diaz and Shannon Dawson, developed and popularized what is now dubbed SAMO© Graffiti (pronounced Same-Oh). It popped up throughout a Lower Manhattan in a President Carter-era New York blighted by rampant crime and economic depression. SAMO© was so pervasive back then that art critic Jeffrey Deitch remarked, “…you couldn’t go anywhere interesting in Lower Manhattan without noticing that someone named SAMO had been there first.”

By early 1980 Basquiat had been placing SAMO© Graffiti solo and subsequently suffered a falling out with his former partners. In what might be considered retaliation, he began leaving the mark “SAMO IS DEAD,” at times writing over or crossing out earlier SAMO© Graffiti. “I wrote SAMO IS DEAD all over the place,” Basquiat said in a later interview, “And I started painting.”

It was not an act of professional suicide. For one thing, Jean-Michel was still very much a starving artist. There was only so much to lose. For another, according to René Ricard’s definition, Basquiat could not yet have been considered a professional because his artwork wasn’t producing enough income to allow him to support himself. He was at the time relying on the kindness of strangers, the charity of friends, and the love of women such as Suzanne Mallouk. Third, he was already famous in his own right within certain circles reverent of his irreverent, defiant brand of artwork. Had it not been for an earlier television appearance, fortune may not have favored him so.

Before he embarked on the SAMO IS DEAD campaign, Basquiat had been pronounced the author of SAMO© Graffiti on the underground Glenn O’Brien cable access show TV Party. With a single stroke O’Brien solved the mystery countless art fans had been mulling over almost since SAMO© first appeared. Luminary graffiti artist Keith Harring, upon learning of the character’s death, hosted an art world celebrity-filled wake for SAMO in his Club 57. Although Basquiat had earlier formed a surprisingly successful band called Gray, performing in New York’s hippest clubs in relatively short order, Jean-Michel never performed as a musician at Harring’s club.

“And I started painting.” In June 1980 Jean-Michel displayed work in The Times Square Show and signed with Annina Nosei’s SoHo gallery late in the same year. Renowned art critic/at-the-time-infamous-homosexual/author of the now legendary poem The Death of Johnny Stompanato/drug user/man-about-town René Ricard wrote the iconic, historic, erudite article The Radiant Child for ARTFORUM magazine published in December 1981. It thrust Basquiat directly into the faces and pocketbooks of New York’s well-heeled art investors and the far poorer aficionados who genuinely appreciated Basquiat’s unique ability to represent his political positions in work referencing not merely New York graffiti but the works of Cy Twombly, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Rauschenberg, and Pablo Picasso as well.

1981, it can be said, was Basquiat’s year. In January he made a cameo appearance – in that red room as a disc jockey unconcerned with… ya know… actually tending his turntable – in the music video Rapture by Deborah Harry’s and Chris Stein’s preeminent, now classic 80s rock band Blondie. The song became the first rap-influenced single to hit #1 in the U.S. Later in the year the very early independent film New York Beat was released starring Jean-Michel (and re-released in 2000 under new ownership as Downtown 81). The trade paper Variety called the film “an extraordinary real-life snapshot of hip, arty, clubland Manhattan in the post-punk era.” Art critic Adrian Searle said, “Downtown 81 captures that New York moment when punk, emerging rap, art school cool and the East Village art and music scenes were at their creative best.” ARTFORUM, not known for its attention to motion pictures, focused on Jean-Michel’s performance: “Basquiat is a joy to watch. He floats through the movie with cool grace and unflagging energy; he’s a natural in front of the lens…” Then Ricard wrote The Radiant Child. All the while Jean-Michel couldn’t get a taxi to stop for him if his life depended on it and was regularly forced to suffer bigots.

Everybody wants to get on the Van Gogh boat. There’s no trip so horrible that someone won’t take it. The idea of the unrecognized genius slaving away in a garret is a deliciously foolish one. We must credit the life of Vincent Van Gogh for really sending this myth into orbit. How many pictures did he sell? One? He couldn’t give them away. We are so ashamed of his life that the rest of art history will be retribution for Van Gogh’s neglect. No one wants to be part of a generation that ignores another Van Gogh.

In this town one is at the mercy of the recognition factor. One’s public appearance is absolute. I consider myself a metaphor of the public. I am a public eye. I am a witness. Part of the artist’s job is to get the work where I will see it. When you first see a new picture, you don’t want to miss the boat. You have to be very careful because you may be staring at Van Gogh’s ear.

What is it about art, anyway that we give it so much importance? Artists are respected by the poor because what they do is an honest way to get out of the slum using one’s sheer self as the medium. The money earned is proof pure and simple of the value of that individual…The Artist. The picture a mother’s son does in jail hangs on her wall as proof that beauty is possible even in the most wretched. And this is a much different idea than the fancier notion that art is a scam and a ripoff. But you could never explain to someone who uses God’s gift to enslave that you have used God’s gift to be free.

– Julian Schnabel’s paraphrase of René Ricard’s The Radiant Child for the movie Basquiat

By 1985 The New York Times Magazine had published on its February 10^th cover Lizzie Himmel’s penetrating portrait of Jean-Michel (perhaps the best ever done) accompanied by the Cathleen McGuigan article New Art, New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist. The next month Basquiat was given a one-man-show at the Mary Boone Gallery – the same venue which displayed the work of David Salle and Julian Schnabel as they rose to international success. In October of 1992 the Whitney Museum of American Art finally got on the boat as well by hosting Basquiat’s first posthumous exhibition.

To this day there is heated debate over Basquiat’s importance. While some consider him to be at least the most talented artist of the period others deride him personally and discount his work quite vociferously. I’m a fan. I can’t tell you why. I’m not one who will sit down and invoke explanations of how the man’s work “[examined] the legacy of the colonial enterprise and his relationship to that legacy” or point out how he “presented a vision of a fragmented self in search of an organizing principle.” For me there is simply something arresting about his work.

The quality, I admit, can be difficult to see initially. Too often it’s just as easy to call his paintings a bunch of scribbles as it is to call an exhibition of fine photographs “just a bunch o’ big blowed up pictures.” (Yes. Someone actually said that to an old friend of mine.) But if you give the images time, the humor and cleverness and possible brilliance begin to emerge. If you stand there and imagine yourself attempting to paint in the same style you’ll start to see how your own visual solutions wouldn’t cut the mustard next to what Basquiat did. Trust me. If you devote the effort, you’ll see what I’m talking about. For me it took about 20 years if you consider reading that New York Times Magazine article my first introduction to his work.

At the risk of belaboring the point, I’ll say one more thing about Basquiat’s disputed ability and motivations. When I hear people dismiss his paintings as childish, talentless efforts I can’t help but recall what was first said of Jackson Pollack’s “drip paintings.” (That term, after all, was originally one of derision.) When I read pieces calling Jean-Michel a showman out for nothing but fame I find it hard to resist comparing their comments to those that dogged Salvador Dali. Whether the eccentric, oddly moustachio’d gentleman had a taste for celebrity or not, there’s nary a soul today who would accuse Señor Dali of lacking exceptional, extraordinary gifts.

Whatever you might believe about Jean-Michel Basquiat’s level of talent, his motivations, or his lifestyle it’s quite difficult to claim at this point that he was bereft of importance. The simple fact that there are literally thousands of allusions to him and articles about him by default establishes him as quite the substantial cultural figure. The fact that the last person to purchase a Basquiat (to my knowledge) spent nearly $15 million for the privilege, the fact that JMB is now in your kid’s art history book, and the fact that even today, three decades after Basquiat put it aside, graffiti artists are still paying homage to SAMO© all over the walls of New York pretty well chisels in stone the Haitian-Puerto Rican-American’s name.

Jean-Michel’s mother was named Matilda. She was of Puerto Rican descent and living in Brooklyn when Gerard Basquiat arrived there from Haiti. They married. Gerard worked as an accountant as Matilda taught Jean-Michel French, Spanish, and English, encouraged his fascination with art, history, mythology and symbolist poetry, and regularly took him to view his favorite painting; Picasso’s Guernica.

The man that had ultimately been his closest friend, Slovakian-American Andy Warhol, died in New York City on February 22, 1987 at 6:32 a.m. of complications from a routine gallbladder surgery. Warhol had always eschewed the use of illegal drugs and, just prior to his death and at the end of his tolerance, severed his relationship with the marijuana-smoking, cocaine-sniffing, heroine-experimenting Jean-Michel. Basquiat went into what was likely clinical depression after Warhol’s death, became an ardent heroin user, took a vacation to his ranch in Hawaii, returned to New York proclaiming his drug-free status, and then promptly died on Friday, August 12, 1988 of a heroin overdose.

A reading of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s life plays like a schadenfreude-laced Greek Tragedy for his detractors. His existence followed a spectacularly clear bell curve from beginning to end. It is in the years and decades following his demise that his name has become genuinely distinguished. As the years roll on, that will fade away utterly and we will collectively forget the details of his life. All but the most dedicated will lose sight of what he did, why he did what he did, the controversy attached to his name, and who he knew and who knew him. He may become Hiroshi Murata or Gilbert Stuart or Ida Applebroog – artists of verifiable contribution with whom almost no one is familiar. He might rise to the stature of Pollack and Dali and capture our attention for some extended period. Basquiat may even breach the ceiling and be mentioned in the next millennium with Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci and Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, but the human race will with all certainty no longer identify with his experiences, his influences, or have any concrete sense of who he was as a fellow human being. He will, at the very worst, evolve into an overlooked footnote and, at the best, a mythic being hardly anyone can fathom as a living, breathing person. He will, finally, become yet another entry for art students to memorize.

The moment of real appreciation is now. Now while we still remember Basquiat’s celebrated affair with fêted songstress Madonna and the incumbent, inevitable generation of widespread comment both jeering and jubilant. Now while we understand what “Walking While Black” means. Now while we have footage of JMB in action. Now, of all times, while we recognize the fact that if a tiny, poor little country called Haiti encompassing no more than half of an island hadn’t persevered, Jean-Michel Basquiat never would have existed.