‘King Pleasure’: A beautifully crafted intro to Jean-Michel Basquiat

King Pleasure is designed by the architect David Adjaye, who also designed The National Museum of African American History and Culture in DC, the surfaces are sumptuous, rich and dark – an antidote to the “white box” condition of modern galleries and museums. At the start, a glistening wood tunnel with fluid corners and aquiline edges urges us through Basquiat’s early years, presenting childhood home movies and teenage ‘zines of the young artist. It feeds into a recreation of the painter’s family home – a kitchen/dining room with a wall-installed rotary phone and allspice spice rack. Across from the kitchen, there’s a comfortable sitting room with a biography of Muhammad Ali prominently displayed on the bookcase. There are no documentary photos verifying that this isn’t anything more than a fantasy contrived to make us think that Basquiat came from a “normal” middle-class home. What we are aware of is that the painter frequently talked about physical abuse, his parents separated when he was seven, he left home at 15, and was homeless on and off. More importantly, there is almost no mention made of his life as graffiti writer Samo, his band Gray that performed at the Mudd Club, nor his friendships early on with Debbie Harry and Glenn O’Brian. Vaunted curator and founder of P.S.1, Alanna Heiss said of the artist at age 20, “he was the new Rauschenberg.” 

Adjaye lines the walls of the main gallery with wooden slats in imitation of two distinctive untitled paintings on wood from 1984; one featuring a small black head with red and white highlights, the other painting a donkey’s head in black white and red juxtaposed with a dial, either a clockface or rotary telephone. Throughout the show, we become aware that portrait heads and animals, inscribed with text, are the artist’s favourite subjects. The climax of the main gallery is Dry Cell (1988), a life-size monochromatic painting in black of a baboon on a stark yellow background. In a poetic curatorial gesture, the exhibition ends with a matching solid blue painting Kalik, also painted in the year of the artist’s death, 1988, but this time the mostly black brushstrokes describe an enigmatic chemical diagram, with the words “Death of Marat,” a reference to the iconic work of 1793 by the great painter of the French Revolution Jacques Louis-David.

King Pleasure avoids the troubled angels of Basquiat’s nature, and downplays a chronological assessment of his work, instead centring the exhibition on a recreation of Basquiat’s studio. With a soundtrack of Curtis Blow and Debbie Harry blaring in the background, a paint-spattered concrete floor and a carefully reconstructed vacuum-tube TV playing The Breakfast Club, Basquiat’s studio is a fairy-tale rendering of an artist’s studio in 1980’s New York. It is enrapturing with its half-finished bottles of red wine, crumpled cigarette packs, and rhinestone jackets hung from painting racks. According to the wall label, 50 original works of art have been strewn on the floor, hung and leaned on the walls, and laid on tables in order to give a sense of how the artist lived. This is an immense waste – we should be allowed to look at these works carefully. The art is secondary to the idea of the artist. As you walk out of the flickering twilight of the studio, a framed black and white crown painting is centred on the wall, again focusing on the brand of Basquiat, not so much the artist’s practice, and they are two very different things. The exhibition ends with a recreation of the artist’s VIP room at the Palladium, a dance club that once inhabited an old opera house on 14th Street in Manhattan. The installation here is much better, as the two gargantuan murals that Basquiat created for the club cannot be obscured by the props meant to immerse the viewer. King Pleasure does a fine job of exciting newcomers about Jean-Michel Basquiat, and despite all the questionable mythologising, the very deep and profound talent of the artist emerges unscathed.

Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure
31 March - 31 July 2023. The Grand LA, Los Angeles.