Jean-Michel Basquiat reigned as the quintessential 1980s art star. Topped with a tangle of dreadlocks and draped in Commes de Garçon finery, he attracted parasitic hangers-on, beguiled groupies and pie-eyed collectors. Working to the sounds of cool jazz and industrial noise, the Brooklyn native produced wild-style abstract paintings. His work mesmerized the likes of Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol and Deborah Harry — who, Basquiat’s former girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk told The Post, was the “first person he sold a painting to that he was not sleeping with.” It went for $200.
Drugs tragically did in Basquiat, in 1988, just months shy of his 28th birthday. But he and his art have never been hotter than they are now. “People love the rawness,” New York-based art dealer Helly Nahmad said. “They are drawn to his story of being a struggling artist who later overdosed on drugs. He did not produce a lot but [the work] speaks to a lot of different people.”
Last year, Basquiat’s 1982 painting of an enraged-looking skull, called “Untitled,” sold at Sotheby’s for $110 million after a high-flying bidding war between Japanese fashion tycoon Yusaku Maezawa and a Las Vegas casino owner. The price paid by Maezawa set a contemporary-art sales record.
On May 16 and 17, two more of Basquiat’s paintings will hit the auction blocks. Expectations are running high for the pieces — the 1983 word-riddled “Flesh and Spirit” at Sotheby’s and 1984’s African-inspired “Flexible” at Phillips — with estimates planted at $30 million and more than $20 million, respectively. Both have collectors salivating.
“‘Flexible’ is one of the greatest paintings I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Alberto Mugrabi, a Manhattan-based art dealer and a major collector of Basquiat — whose wrist is tattooed with Basquiat’s signature crown. “It is sublime. I think it will go for $50 or $60 million. If it goes for $150 [million], it is still worth it. God, I would do anything to have this painting.”
Adding to the Basquiat froth — rising for at least a decade, during which time prices have gone up tenfold — is the recent release of “Boom for Real,” a documentary on the artist’s early years in Manhattan. The film’s director, Sara Driver, knew him during that seminal era. “He was charismatic and always around,” said Driver. “I recall him being girl-crazy and that girls loved him” — including a pre-famous Madonna, who fell hard for the artist.
“I remember him drawing and painting everywhere,” Driver said. “Jean was a very driven person. He wanted to get his signal out.”
As for what feels like a Basquiat moment, she said, “His work is as relevant now as it ever was. The things he addressed then” — in terms of racial tension, crooked insiders and social upheaval — “we are addressing now.”
An 11th-grade dropout, Basquiat liked to brag about having flunked art classes, instead picking up his aesthetic organically. He was inspired by Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, black athletes and bebop musicians, as well as snippets from the book “Gray’s Anatomy.” At age 7, he was run over by a car and hospitalized. Basquiat wound up losing his spleen. His mother (who would later be institutionalized before passing away in 2008, at age 74) brought a copy of the anatomy book to his sickbed.
In the late ’70s, denizens of the New York art world knew about Basquiat before they knew him. He made a name for himself as a mystery graffiti artist, spray-painting, along with a friend, “SAMO” with the copyright symbol and free-form messages upon Soho buildings. “Like an ignorant Easter suit,” read a short one.
At a thrown-together 1979 downtown graffiti-art show called Canal Zone, Basquiat showed up as an unknown and asked if he could spray-paint something on the wall. Given the green light, he revealed himself to be one of the SAMO guys and hysteria ensued. He became an instant sensation.
Essentially homeless upon arrival in Manhattan — he ran away from the strict rules of his now-deceased CPA father — Basquiat circulated through the East Village, staying with a variety of women and leaving behind works of art the way other boho boyfriends might trail old socks.
Alexis Adler, now an embryologist who shared an East Village apartment with Basquiat, lucked out when the artist made his mark on a bathroom door and an expanse of bedroom wall.
“Conservators came and cut them out in 2015,” she said. “I live on the top floor of a tenement and was always nervous [about a leak] damaging the wall.”
She added, “They each sold for $500,000 at Christie’s.”
Basquiat’s big break came in 1981, when he was invited to participate in an art show at PS 1 in Long Island City. Called “New York New Wave” and organized by artist Diego Cortez, it attracted the attention of Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger. He bought 15 paintings from the show and began representing Basquiat overseas. Soho dealer Annina Nosei took him on in New York City.
In the BBC-made Basquiat documentary “Rage to Riches,” art dealer Larry Gagosian recalled stumbling across the artist’s work at a Nosei group show. Gagosian’s reaction: “My hair [was] standing up.” On the spot, he purchased three pieces for $9,000 and accepted the offer to meet Basquiat, assuming that Jean-Michel would be an old Frenchman.
“I saw this black guy sitting in the office with paint-stained jeans, smoking a big fat joint,” said Gagosian, who would put on a show with Basquiat in LA and set him up in a Venice Beach home-cum-studio where scavenged wooden boards were used to create “Flexible.” “Right off the bat, there was a rapport between us.”
Very quickly, Basquiat found himself at the white-hot center of the art world. With work being shown in Europe, Asia and Africa, he often arrived early and created his pieces on location — after setting himself up with local drug dealers. Mallouk, who would soon split from Basquiat and burn her former beau’s belongings outside his loft window, commented on their change in circumstances: “We went from having no money to more money than we knew what to do with.”
But success came with a price. “Jean had tremendous pressure on him,” said Driver, referring to the demands of creating art, selling art and moving in the right circles. “He realized he was becoming a commodity. Jean was a sensitive person and I think this was painful for him.”
Along the way, Basquiat developed unquenchable desires for heroin and cocaine — and he had the money to support his blossoming habits. Basquiat once did opium by inserting it in his rectum. Cocaine use became so excessive that he blew a hole in his nose and turned to freebasing.
By the mid-1980s, Basquiat occupied a small building rented from Warhol on Great Jones Street near the Bowery. “It was a large place with living quarters upstairs and the studio downstairs,” recalled artist friend Brett De Palma. “He would retreat to the bedroom to do drugs. It had a huge rear-projection TV, a king-size bed and that was basically it. Boy George would come over, go upstairs with Jean and everybody would stay below. Jean did coke and then used heroin to come down.”
Rumors swirled that he traded art for drugs, circumventing the galleries he contracted with.
But, De Palma added, it wasn’t all a grim storm of rocks and powders. “He threw lavish parties catered by Mr. Chow. There’d be big tins of caviar from Dean & DeLuca. He would put piles of cash on the table and tell people to take money if they wanted it. He used that as a test. I took $100 one time and paid him back. He said I was the first to do so.”
Through it all, Basquiat kept creating. He did a series of pieces with Warhol and watched his own art get influenced by drugs. “The work became more complex and more sophisticated,” De Palma said. “The drugs created disjunctive thinking. People would be in Jean’s house, immobilized; he’d be up, painting. At a certain point, though, he’d throw everybody out and say he needed to work.”
By the time of his last show, in 1988, he came off as a junk-addled wreck. “I saw him there,” Driver recalled. “He was missing teeth and his skin looked bad. He had been one of the handsomest men in New York. It was heartbreaking. We were worried. We felt like he was going to die.”
On Aug. 12, 1988, after a trip to Maui designed to get him off drugs, Basquiat overdosed on heroin in his Great Jones Street home. The artist, who would be 57 today, is survived by two sisters, Lisane and Jeanine, both in their early 50s. They oversee the Basquiat estate and put “Flexible” up for sale.
Considering his short life, lamentable death and the subject matter he dealt with, it’s easy to wonder how he’d feel about his work trading among businessmen for nine-figure sums. “Jean would have definitely seen the irony, and part of him would have hated it,” Mallouk said. “Another part of him would have been exhilarated to see the world acknowledge the suffering that his paintings express and to value his voice.”