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Elizabeth Hess, Village Voice, 11/3/92
"Jean-Michel Basquiat would not have appreciated the fact that the art world is divided up into those who think he was a genius and those who think he was a fraud. "White supremacist" critics and curators—and there are many—refuse to give any living black painter his or her due. Nevertheless, basquiat was born with an artist gene (in Brooklyn); he made it all the way to Documenta, the prestigious German art fair, by the time he was 21 because he was already painting exceptional works of art...As the Reagan-Bush years wore on and racism became more rampant, opinion turned against basquiat and all the graffiti masters...He was dangerously good. basquiat was dismissed as a kind of opportunist party boy with a big ego. (name one famous male artist with a small one.)...His shocking OD death at the age of 27 was devastating. The Rude Boy had not yet secured his place in history...Right now I'd take students to see Basquiat before Matisse [Matisse and Basquiat retrospective held at same time in NYC in '92]. Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that Basquiat is the better painter, but that he's the infinitely more relevant painter. Matisse may be the most socially disengaged artist we have ever seen in depth at the Modern; basquiat's work is saturated in the political culture of the moment (his own heritage is Haitian and Puerto Rican) and the search for the artist's self. While much of the work is abstract the overt subject is always racial identity...his paintings describe, over and over, the artist's anger. Basquiat was a great poet, with a rare ability to combine both pigment and text on one surface...Basquiat's poems often have a visual shape, as if they are dimensional...At their best, the artworks are layered with references to...the unpredictable. The artist's anxious hand is always moving. As many critics have suggested, the influence of Dubuffet and Twombly are obvious, along with the bravado of Picasso. But the mood is jazz. Basquiat, apparently, worked to music and television, which explains why his output is so unconnected to social realities. And disconnected too..."