Curated by Fred Hoffman, Kellie Jones, Marc Mayer, Franklin Sirmans
According to Marc Mayer, leader of this show’s four-person curatorial team, Basquiat was “the last great modernist painter.” How so? Because, “if we think of him as a painter of the School of Paris, he was essentially a figurative and even narrative painter—but there’s an extraordinary, breathless, endless reservoir of references in his work, as if he wanted his paintings to represent all of human history.” If this sounds a little like saying that a camel is a giraffe, but has humps—be patient. A Basquiat retrospective (of some ninety works) with a real art-historical ax to grind is something we need to see.
Travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, July 15–Oct. 9; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Nov. 18–Feb. 12, 2006.
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