Someone said to me recently that they didn’t care for Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work because it it’s too “messy and chaotic.” That struck me as odd as it’s never seemed that way to me. There is certainly no more disorder than Gustav Klimt and there are parallels there, in my mind anyway. I’ve never seen any single brush stroke in Basquiat’s work as anything less than felt, thought, and deliberated over. It isn’t particularly geometrical in any sense beyond the limitations of the rectangle canvas or paper, but how many painters are over the ages? It all makes sense to me.

It always struck me with his work that it’s almost a time capsule. This is what New York looked like at the time, and not simply because you could see him in random street art around town. His painting is a perfect representation of my city in flux or in transition. It was old city peering out from beneath layers of grime and layers of new city and more layers of new grime. The city itself was a large-scale decoupage with every person leaving a mark or a scar or a brush stroke or a sticker or a stencil. In Basquiat’s work I find a familiar. A comfort. A birth. A steady process of becoming. It captures something that more traditional painters never did. Even Edward Hopper, whom I adore, had a different vibe. He portrayed a pervading loneliness in urban settings, and alienation. Basquiat, even in paintings where there is a single, central subject, connects the subject to the setting, whereas painters like Hopper portrayed characters removed emotionally from the setting, desolate. With Basquiat, it’s all one. Every single element is connected and that’s why I’ve never seen “messy” or “chaotic.” All the individual “cells” are connected and vibrating at the same frequency.

Mostly, for me, this is what New York as I knew it looked like. There may have been nothing recognizable as order but it was all part of the same organism.

The only more off-base criticism I’ve ever heard was that his work is “primitive.” I thought at first I was mishearing or misunderstanding and that the person said or meant primal. Certainly there is a primal energy so, okay. They meant primitive though and having clarified that my response was, “You’re primitive.” (The discussion obviously didn’t go much further from there. My bad.) There is nothing primitive about any of his paintings. Quite the opposite, it’s all very highly evolved and to consider it akin to “art brut” is plainly short-sighted, stupid, and probably racist.

I do feel privileged to have shared the same space at the same time as Jean-Michel Basquiat. We didn’t know each other, of course, despite that it’s entirely possible that we passed each other on the street many times. It does lend a kind of connectedness to his work though, that we saw the same things (definitely on a different level). He ended up buried in the Greenwood Cemetery, just 1000 feet up the hill from where I lived for years. It’s funny too that decades later any of his paintings still exceeds my ability to articulate what we saw in the same space at the same time. He’s still kind of doing it for me.