In the 60 years that separate Alexander Korda’s “Rembrandt” (1936) from Mary Harron’s “I Shot Andy Warhol” (1996), few commercial films have successfully captured the lives of visual artists.
This should not be a surprise, as acts of creation depend on an interior existence that the camera can glimpse only from the exterior, through dramatic incidents or encounters. If photogenic drama does not exist, filmmakers invent it, most often from the sentimental romantic assumption that everything artists do is larger-than-life, turbulent, misunderstood and part of an uncontrollable need for self-expression.
The prospect that someone directly involved with the art world might make the best biopic of an artist is appealing. Perhaps an insider could be clear-eyed enough to look past cliches and create a film without specious drama. Not that anyone need be strict about details. If the project explored artistic issues or were itself a work of visual art, that, too, would satisfy. There’s more than one way to be faithful to an artist’s spirit.
Julian Schnabel’s “Basquiat,” which opened Friday, is a film about a painter by a painter. The subject and the writer-director were on the same scene during the 1980s. Both achieved extraordinary success in a fraction of the time it took their predecessors to do so. Even so, “Basquiat” is no better than most film attempts at depicting the life of an artist. It merely replaces the sentimentality of a Hollywood observer with the sentimentality of a New York participant.
The facts of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s life easily lend themselves to film biography treatment. Son of a middle-class Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat began his career as Samo, a graffiti artist who wrote words and phrases on buildings in downtown Manhattan. After switching to paint on canvas and boards, Basquiat added jaggedly drawn images to words, and this was the “primitive” combination by which he achieved notoriety.
The ’80s thrived on attitude over substance, and Basquiat played the role of a modern-day “wild child” who was becoming integrated into high society but clearly was not of it. Stories circulated of him painting barefoot in designer suits. The image was one part National Geographic, another part Gentleman’s Quarterly and a third part Artforum.
Basquiat remains a mystery
Basquiat first was represented by Annina Nosei, who gave him a basement studio, then by Schnabel’s dealer, Mary Boone, whose high-profile clientele assured celebrity. In less than a decade, he rose from chalk drawings on streets to collaborative paintings with Andy Warhol, who had become to him a bizarre father figure. When Basquiat died of a heroin overdose in 1988, he had achieved fame in the United States and Europe. He was 27.
This is as sensational as anything in such faithful film biographies as Peter Watkins’ “Edvard Munch” (1976), Bruno Nuytten’s “Camille Claudel” (1988) and Robert Altman’s version of the Van Gogh story, “Vincent & Theo” (1990). But “Basquiat” is not as literal in its treatment of fact as were the others. Schnabel has compressed, elided and invented more freely.
The result gives a smooth arc between the ascent and decline of an artist, but little else. Basquiat is an ambitious, magnetic, proud, obnoxious cipher. We know Toulouse-Lautrec drinks cognac in John Huston’s “Moulin Rouge” (1952) to forget his stunted legs. But what’s the relationship between Basquiat’s drug-taking and his mother’s mental illness? The film doesn’t speculate. For all we know, he shoots up because a really cool artist has to do something besides paint and get babes.
“Basquiat” shows a syringe only once but reveals art-world predators everywhere, so perhaps we are meant to see their selfishness, vanity and incomprehension as what really killed the painter. Art dealers and collectors are here like members of the Inquisition in Henry Koster’s 1959 film about Francisco Goya, “The Naked Maja.” They are villains a knowing audience will relate to a specific historical period. Their role is to torment the already tormented artist. Only, Goya will escape.
Basquiat is doomed from the start. In a dreamlike scene intercut with the opening credits, the young artist and his mother visit Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” at the Museum of Modern Art. The mother weeps. On the head of the child magically appears a glowing gold crown. It symbolizes something about the legacy of genius intertwined with suffering, but the image is so foolish it will remind viewers more of the old TV commercial for Imperial margarine.
The crown returns in a another fantasy sequence at the end of the film. Basquiat the child is imprisoned in a tower in medieval Russia. (Henryk Gorecki’s “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” on the soundtrack has words in Polish, but the peasants wear Russian outfits, so it must be Russia.) The child bangs his crown against the bars in desperation. But the sounds of his agony are consoling music to workers who lower their scythes and look to the sky.
The film cuts to the grown-up, drugged-out Basquiat, who smiles and says to a friend: “Let’s go to Ireland. We’ll stop in every bar and have a drink.” Leave it to Schnabel to deify an artist who immediately tells us his feet are on the ground.
Schnabel likes having things both ways. So he depicts Warhol as a puzzled, halting idiot but then has Albert Milo, a fictional character who is Schnabel’s alter ego, praise Warhol to Basquiat. The real Warhol said the real Schnabel “copi(ed) people’s work and (was) pushy.” Schnabel not only gets back at Warhol–as he does to a lesser degree with dealers Boone and Bruno Bischofberger–but also takes credit for giving praise. The last time we see Warhol, he stands in his studio before portraits he never really painted of–guess who?–Julian Schnabel.
Apart from Basquiat’s street-wise friend Benny, the Milo/Schnabel character is the film’s only dispenser of wisdom and, in a scene of an exhibition opening, the only artist Basquiat clearly envies. More of his paintings–which are in fact Schnabel originals–are photographed more clearly than any of the Basquiat copies.
Sentimental claptrap
In any film about artists, we expect to see something about how they work. About one-quarter of Jacquette Rivette’s four-hour “La Belle Noiseuse” (1991), for example, shows a fictional artist drawing and painting from a model, so there’s also plenty of time spent looking. Basquiat’s words and images do not lend themselves to that sort of treatment. But Martin Scorsese’s “Life Lessons,” one of three short films in the 1989 “New York Stories,” gives the sense of an entire exhibition of abstract expressionist works being painted, through extreme close-ups of a brush rapidly alternating with long shots of the artist darting across huge canvases.
“Basquiat” does not reflect on the process of creation or attempt to capture any aspect of it. The most the film does is recast a notorious anecdote from the ’80s, wherein Schnabel was supposed to have painted over a canvas given him by colleague David Salle. In the film, Basquiat does the same with his girlfriend’s canvases and one of her dresses. Schnabel makes her more angry about the dress than the paintings and soon shows her laughing, a victim happy to accept the obliteration of her art because, after all, her lover is the better painter.
This is as phony as the reaction of Rivette’s master painter, who in effect destroys his greatest canvas because to show it would reveal the vulnerability of his model and a troubled relationship within his family. No real artists give up their work with the ease Schnabel and Rivette suggest. Each reaction is sentimental claptrap.
Schnabel has said he has seen “The Godfather” 200 times. If so, all he seems to have learned from it is a mistaken application of color. “Moulin Rouge” and Vincente Minnelli’s Van Gogh biopic, “Lust for Life” (1956), rigorously derived their chromatic effects from the paintings of their subjects. “Basquiat” favors the muddiness of Schnabel’s own canvases more than anyone else’s. The film has the drab color and casual composition of a police procedural rather than a biography of an incendiary artist.
In the absence of visual gratifications, a film biography can always put forth artistic issues, though there, too, “Basquiat” is at a loss. The concluding fantasy suggests an attempt to generalize from the specific case, but apart from the art world’s falsity and greed, the film reveals little that’s universal.
The oblique biography that yields far-reaching ideas is also beyond Schnabel and, in truth, most others from the Western film world. Kenzo Mizoguchi achieved it in “Utamaro and His Five Women” (1946), and Andrei Tarkowsky did even better with “Andrei Rublev” 20 years later (1966). In both cases, fact yielded to a poetic meditation on the artist’s relationship to self and society. Kitagawa Utamaro, an 18th Century Japanese master of color prints, and Andrei Rublev, a 14th Century Russian religious painter, were both the subjects and inspirations that led somewhere else.
“Basquiat” seeks to attain visionary heights, though it says nothing about being an artist that Ken Russell hadn’t already covered in “Savage Messiah” (1972), an adolescent portrait of 20th Century sculptor Henri Gaudier-Breszka. The names, places and delusions are different. Otherwise, the same braying self-promotion passes itself off as film art.
