Original subtitles

This programme contains very strong language.

Jean-Michel was going to make things happen in the creative space

by any means necessary.

He was this kid that had taken New York by storm.

This work that's just screaming revolutionary intentions.

I'd never seen a black artist with this kind of unbelievable talent

and unbelievable charisma.

So they have this image of me, you know, wild monkey man.

Whatever the BLEEP they think.

We went from total poverty to having so much money

that we didn't know what to do with it.

There was a lot of resentment,

there was a lot of envy and it had definitely had a racist edge to it.

Whether one regards themselves as an artist or a black artist,

it never stops being complicated.

$69 million.

We're going to produce him, we're going to market him.

I'm selling on this side of the room.

It's Yuki's bidder, fair warning.

We are going to cannibalise him.

And selling for $98 million.

Thank you, Yuki. Congratulations.

As his sister, almost 30 years later, I continue to be saddened

by the fact that my brother isn't still here.

I think if you want to know what there is to know about Jean-Michel,

the place to go is to his work.

Of course there is. Yeah, of course there is.

Tell me about the anger as well.

Mm.

Um.

You're on top of the world.

I mean, I like the way, you know,

I hear we're doing some work together and you paint me out.

When do I paint you out?

I mean, everything I've done, you've painted me out. Where? Well...

Where? Just... Where?

What's your earliest, most vivid childhood memory?

Probably getting hit by a car, I guess.

How did that happen? I was playing on the street.

How old were you? I was seven.

Seven or eight years old.

We lived in Brooklyn, we lived in Flatbush,

and Jean-Michel was playing outside when he was seven...

..with a group of friends, they were playing stick ball.

My mother asked me to go out and get him for dinner, which I did.

He came running across the street,

forgot something and turned around to go back.

As he was running across the street, a car came around the corner.

He was in the hospital for a really, really long time.

One of the gifts that my mother brought to him

was the book Gray's Anatomy.

She wanted him to have the opportunity to see his own body

as it related to the way it had to be reconstructed.

His spleen was removed.

That was a book that was highly influential for him.

My father played music from the moment that he came home from work

until he went to bed.

And he played all different genres.

Jazz was a big influence but he also played classical and Donna Summer.

Our mom took us to museums.

NEWSREEL: For the schoolchildren of Brooklyn,

these visits to the museum are creating an awareness of art

and its development through the centuries.

Jean-Michel was our older brother.

He was incredibly mischievous.

He was incredibly creative.

He always drew.

You don't envision that your brother would be famous

but it is always something that he felt that he would be.

I also believe that his creative influence just came from inside,

I think he just came here that way.

PLAYS JAZZ MUSIC

The city looked big, I felt big, because I was part of the landscape.

I'm an artist.

When you tell people that, they usually say,

"What's your medium?"

I usually say, "Extra large."

Jean-Michel left home

because he had something that was burning inside of him.

He did whatever he needed to do in order to be a painter

and in order to be an artist and in order to express himself.

And I think it takes a tremendous amount of balls to do that.

New York City from the mid-70s

up to the early '80s

was a creative paradise.

New York was falling apart, going bankrupt.

The straight people were all leaving,

so all the crazy artists flocked here.

The time was electric.

Anything felt possible.

Very inexpensive rents.

I was able to live

for $80 a month.

Like almost everyone who was living downtown in the late 1970s,

we were intrigued by the remarkable conceptual graffiti of SAMO.

Even in my own building, there was the SAMO graffiti.

Right by the door.

I thought, this must be a street philosopher,

somebody who is writing multiple choice questions on the wall,

asking profound questions about values.

SAMO was everywhere.

It was on all the buildings,

I was thrilled by it.

Everyone downtown had seen SAMO tags.

I can remember first moving to New York and seeing lines like,

"A pin drops like a pungent odour, copyright SAMO."

There was a lot of conversation downtown - "Who is SAMO?"

People claimed to have seen SAMO.

I first met Jean-Michel in the fall of '76

because that's when I first went to City-As-School.

Me and Jean-Michel and other students

that were interested in writing created a high school newspaper.

And Jean-Michel wrote a brilliant essay about an ideal religion

that would... just filled all the needs and he named it SAMO.

SAMO was part of the slang back then

where you would hear elderly black guys talking to each other

and say, "Hey, what's up?"

And the other guy would answer, "Samo, samo."

In other words, the same old shit or the same old thing, whatever.

And that's really where we borrowed that from,

that's absolutely where we borrowed it from.

Me being the graffiti artist,

I liked that format and we started to write SAMOs using that format.

And then they became like SAMO as an alternative to God.

So it now was this thing.

I started going around with Jean-Michel with a Magic Marker

and he would do the SAMO and I would do my Jetson thing.

Al Diaz, there was a partnership, SAMO, was also hanging around.

I introduced him to Keith Haring, who I had met that same week.

When I first arrived at the School of Visual Arts in '78,

not everyone hanging out there was actually a student.

Jean-Michel was not a student but he wanted to meet artists,

he wanted to be hanging around artists,

so that was a natural place to just hang out.

I think there was

a very self-conscious dimension to what he did.

You know, he didn't do SAMO, his tag line graffiti,

he didn't do it just any place.

He did it real close to Soho.

It was a successful hype project.

It is the Canal Zone and it's happening here and now.

If you're lost, you can find yourself right here,

right now in the Canal Zone.

I first met Jean-Michel Basquiat April 29th, 1979.

It was the night of the Canal Zone party thrown by myself,

a British artist named Stan Peskett and Fab 5 Freddy.

It was called Canal Zone

and it was kind of our first Soho downtown party.

We were going to have a party

that would introduce aerosol graffiti artists from uptown

to the downtown fine art scene.

Jean-Michel showed up. He was SAMO at the time, he was known as SAMO.

Jean-Michel came out of the shadows.

I didn't know who he was.

He said, "I'd like to do something as well."

And I said, "Sure," and I put a spray can in his hand,

"There's a wall, do it."

It was magic. Suddenly, everybody kind of went crazy.

All of a sudden, someone, I hear voices, very excited,

and I walk over and I see someone spray painting on the wall.

He did one of his multiple-choice SAMOs.

It was like, oh, my God. This is SAMO.

SAMO. S-A-M-O. Come on, you've seen it on the walls.

Everyone, especially in the village. This gentleman right here is SAMO.

Nobody knew who SAMO was, he was totally enigmatic.

It was like a Banksy figure.

And I immediately ran over and grabbed his arm and I said,

"I've been looking for you." And he looked at me and he had,

like, the most beautiful smile, he said, "You have?"

And I said, "Yes." And he said, "Well, why are you here?"

I said, "I live here."

When we went into my room,

I had books and music that he knew and loved

and it's like an automatic pass.

I used to take baseball cards and paint them with white-out,

paint the faces out.

He really liked what I was doing.

Plus I had a room.

We clicked and that was amazing and he said,

"I want to make postcards with you."

We went to photo booths and got our picture taken and, like,

I would do something and then he would come and do it.

And we'd get to the point where we both agreed,

"OK, that's really good. Let's use that."

We were going out on the street, we did it every day,

and we'd make, you know, sometimes we'd make, like, $15

and that was a bonanza.

He would shave his head on the street with a razor.

People would be like, "Oh, my God. What is that?"

We'd come out of Jamie Canvas after making another bunch

of colour Xeroxes and we're walking down the street talking

and Jean-Michel looks in the window of this brand-new restaurant called

WPA and sees Andy Warhol and Henry Geldzahler sitting at a table.

Jean-Michel grabs my arm, and says, "Oh, my God. It's Andy."

And I was like, "Oh, my God."

He said, "You stay here. They're fags." He goes in...

..comes back out after ten minutes.

I'm waiting out on the sidewalk.

And I said, "What took so long?"

He said, "Well, they only had a five

"and they needed to get change of the five."

And I said, "How many did they buy?"

Two. So they bought one that said, "Stupid games, bad ideas,"

and another one that was a colour Xerox of a pair of sunglasses

that we had splattered white-out on and re-Xeroxed.

He loved Andy

and to meet him in person was, I think,

a really important moment for him.

Andy Warhol bought something that he made

and that was amazing for him.

It was like, "Oh, my God,

"you not only met him but he actually bought something from you,

"he purchased...?" This is amazing.

Andy was like our hero figure.

He redefined what the role of an artist could be.

Say cheese.

He had told me that he sold a postcard to Andy Warhol,

and he was really excited.

I began to understand that he wanted fame.

He really wanted fame.

Probably, you know, in the same week

he goes on the Glenn O'Brien Show as SAMO.

So now he's become SAMO.

I mean, it was us and now he had become the face for SAMO.

Tonight, we're lucky enough to have with us probably the most

language oriented of all graffiti artists in New York,

Sammo, and his associate.

It's SAMO. SAMO, sorry. It's Mr SAMO.

It's my personal signature.

Sorry, Mr SAMO. Well, you know, you see it written on the walls

and you don't know how to pronounce it.

And do you write something different every time

or do you write the, you know...?

I've written the same thing before, just...

It all depends, you know, like how inspired I feel.

At a certain point, you saw the graffiti, "SAMO is dead."

So Jean, here he is killing SAMO,

cos he's the only one that ever wrote, "SAMO is dead,"

I never wrote, "SAMO is dead."

And as a result, it damaged our relationship.

That was the point where Jean-Michel began to assert himself

as the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

I never went to art school.

I failed the art courses that I did take in school.

I just looked at a lot of things and that's what...

That's how I think I learned about art, by looking at it.

When we met in the late '70s,

one of the things that made us become really good friends

was we both spent a lot of time going to museums as young kids.

And somehow the idea popped up, like,

let's start Museum Club, and Wednesday was the day

when we would hop in a cab and head up to the Metropolitan Museum.

Jean-Michel and I would often act like we were art students

when we would come here.

We'd have our little sketch pads, acting like we were sketching.

These are all school of Caravaggio, by the way.

Young black man in the painting up there, nice.

Caravaggio, he's just so great.

Me and Jean-Michel talked about this.

Like, we dug him and we did some reading about him

and the fact that he, like, carried a sword

was pretty bad boy for that time period.

You know, like, you see it in movies, people carrying swords,

you just think it's a regular thing,

but if you carried a sword,

you were gangster,

you carried it because you knew you were going to use it

or you were not afraid to use it, so,

some real bad boy business going on.

This guy invented creative lighting.

It's just amazing, you know.

Chiaroscuro. Light to dark, baby, simple.

Simple stuff, basic stuff.

Pretty good crown he's got on there, huh?

You know, the crown was a significant part of early graffiti,

you would put a crown over your name if you felt you were worthy.

Jean would get a good kick out of that guy's crown.

This is Autumn Rhythm, so this is a really famous Pollock,

and I remember Jean and I looking at it,

appreciating it and also talking about the fact

that, at this time in the early '50s, when these paintings

were being made, Jackson Pollock's studio was in the Village

and he was going to jazz clubs,

and this is something that's not often talked about,

the fact that the abstract expressionists were developing

at the same time as bebop music and the improvisational nature

that was going on in there.

Because of the racism at that time,

a lot of critics and art historians wouldn't really elaborate

on the fact that, I mean, you can see the improvisation going on

and, like, I remember Jean-Michel and I talking about that

right here in this building.

I remember talking to Jean about how

the insides of the subway cars at that time were just blitzed

with tag over tag over tag.

There was an unmistakable connection between Pollock and, interestingly,

this Franz Kline over my shoulder.

Like that broad brush stroke,

that calligraphic energy just was just crazy.

Undeniable, you know.

Ah, man.

This is cool. Like, I remember when me and Jean would come here

to Museum Club, you know, we had to talk about Pablo

but what's really interesting, particularly with this piece,

you can see the Cubist period had unleashed

and that whole period was a break-out moment

when Picasso got hip to what Africans were doing

and how they were depicting the image.

It just broke the whole mould of

European artists trying to recreate exactly how the image looked,

perspective, all that kind of stuff, just smashed the game,

broke it wide open.

Once again, that African influence, you know,

you need to recognise, baby, from the motherland.

Dora Maar, you know,

she was a hot one.

Can't you tell?

Back on the street again.

The Lower East Side.

Looked like a war zone.

Like we dropped the bomb on ourselves.

But it was OK.

The star of Downtown 81 is Jean-Michel Basquiat.

And it's not a documentary, like a lot of people think it is.

It's a fairy tale of what our life was back then.

Come on, let me see your painting.

It's a story of a struggling artist who goes around the city

to sell his artwork to pay the rent.

This is really nice.

Thanks.

You want to sell it? You want to buy it?

I'd like to buy one but I can't even afford your paintings.

You have to realise he really didn't have money and no job

and we bought him a lot of canvas and we needed that painting

for the story.

And so the first paintings he did

were really for the purpose of the film.

Hey, man, that's private property.

Hey, my man, I'm a taxpayer, I can paint anywhere I want to paint.

They chose to focus on Jean-Michel as the kind of star of this movie

and we all had little scenes and cameo scenes in this little snapshot

of the world we lived in.

He's serious, man. You want to check him out.

The pre-gentrified, gritty, grimy, extra fun New York City.

# Fab 5 is in the house and

# Jean-Michel is in the house. #

I met Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1981.

He was working on Downtown 81, the film.

So he told me he was living

in the production offices

for the film, which was a storefront somewhere.

He very quickly moved into my apartment.

It just happened.

I don't feel entirely responsible.

He, erm...

..just moved in.

We both were biethnic, bicultural.

I'm half Palestinian and half English.

He was half Puerto Rican and half Haitian.

We both had very authoritarian, proud fathers that were tough.

He stuttered a little. His mom had been institutionalised

and that was a very sad point for him.

And it made him terribly sad to tell me.

And he would stutter even more when he talked about her.

I had come from Canada at the age of 20 to the East Village

to be an artist.

Hey, man. Hey, man. Later. All right.

Every artist, whatever you were, you were also in a band, you had to be.

If you weren't in a band, you were, like, lame.

Jean-Michel Basquiat made this decision

that we were going to start a band.

Jean wanted me to be a part of that band as well.

I showed up to the first rehearsal.

I was going to do scat rapping or whatever, but I was like...

I fell back, it wasn't for me.

And we were just jumping around with names

and we really weren't sure what it was

and then one day Jean stops and says, "I know the name now.

"Gray."

I believe the reason that it was spelt with an A,

it was named after Gray's Anatomy, which was a book

that was very inspiring for Jean-Michel Basquiat

as a young child. He was hit by a car.

The music he made would create the collage aesthetic.

It's there whether he's doing music, whether he's doing poetry,

whether he's doing painting.

Jean-Michel was painting or drawing

constantly.

There was a drive there that I've never really seen before.

At that time, there were a lot of burned-out buildings

in the East Village.

He couldn't afford art supplies

so he would bring things from the street.

He would bring doors, wooden doors, from these burned-out buildings,

and he would paint on that.

We would get in arguments.

I was the one working and supporting both of us

and he wasn't contributing.

He would always answer my concerns

with the reassurance that he would be famous very soon

and wealthy and that he would look after me.

That would end the argument.

I mean, what could I say?

The first painting that he sold was to Debbie Harry from Blondie

for $200.

# Fab 5 Freddie told me everybody's fly

# DJ's spinning I said, "My, my." #

And that was a lot of money to us at that point

so we went out to dinner in a Chinese restaurant

on Second Avenue and...

Just an ordinary restaurant,

but this was a real treat for us because we were so poor.

It was very special, and he was so happy and so proud.

Jean-Michel's in the video, yeah.

I had wanted Grandmaster Flash to come and be in the video

for the part when she starts rapping.

She mentions me.

"Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody's fly."

And then she says, "DJ spinning, Flash is fast."

Flash didn't believe I really knew them at the time

so he never showed up.

So Jean-Michel was there,

I was like, "Yo, put Jean-Michel at the turntables.

# Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody's fly

# DJ spinning I said, "My, my." #

I saw the first works which Basquiat showed.

It was a show called

New York, New Wave, where Diego Cortez

was the driving force and the main curator.

That was 1981.

Basquiat was given the main wall.

How do you envision the future here for these artists?

Do you think a lot of them are professionals or...?

I don't really worry about the word,

I haven't worried about the word professionals.

I mean, the important thing to me is building a sociology of elements

that depict the scene.

I went to PS1

because I wanted to see the artists of New York.

The work of Jean-Michel's paintings were particularly sophisticated.

What interested me in his work immediately,

they were a new visual language.

I was Andy Warhol's dealer in exclusivity after 1965.

This painting was in the show of New York, New Wave

and one of the biggest paintings, I think, was this,

showing a cityscape of New York.

There are the two World Trade Towers

and on the top I think it's an invented type of writing.

It reminds me a little bit, I said, of works by Twombly.

It's one of the 15 paintings I bought from Diego Cortez

at that time.

I didn't ask him to be in my gallery.

He asked me to be in my gallery.

And I said, "But my next group show doesn't have anything

"to do with your work." Why?

Because it's called Public Address and he said, "No, on the contrary,

"I fit in it."

He defended his point in a way that was extremely sophisticated

for his age. He was so strong, the works that he presented,

that I decided that the second part of the gallery

was completely for him.

I walked over to Annina's gallery, a couple of blocks from my loft,

and I walked into the last room in Annina's gallery.

Literally my hair stood up

on my neck. It just had an electrifying impact on me.

The one that's called Skull is almost anatomical

but also with fierce eyes.

The perspective, the colour, the intensity, just incredibly powerful.

And I saw, I think, four or five paintings.

I had never seen the work before, I'd never heard of the artist,

I didn't even know that this artist was going to be in the show.

I knew nothing.

Annina at that point came out to greet me, and I said, "Wow,

"how much are these paintings?

"If you'll allow me to, I'll buy three of them."

With the discount, it probably cost me about $9,000

for the three of them.

She says, "Would you like to meet the artist?"

I'd just bought three paintings. I said, "Absolutely."

I thought I was going to meet some old French guy when I heard the name

and then I see this black guy sitting in her office

with hair like, you know, if you've seen the photographs,

and literally paint-stained jeans and smoking a big, fat joint.

Right off the bat there was a rapport between us.

Coming out of minimalism in its grids,

this next generation Jean-Michel,

a great example of,

blew that all up.

And he didn't have any place to make a lot of paintings so he started to

paint them in my basement downstairs.

He was very productive and it was like he had a nine-to-five job

that was very interesting.

He would wake up early in the morning and go there

and then come home around five or six.

I had a job at a gallery called Sperone Westwater Fischer.

On my lunch hour Jean would say,

"I'm painting in this basement, come visit."

Jean would talk about

France Klein or even Robert Motherwell,

people that I was kind of amazed that he even knew about

since he hadn't been to art school.

Jean was in awe of Cy Twombly and would talk about Cy Twombly.

I said, "Jeann, you know, Cy Twombly is staying in the apartment

"at the gallery where I work."

"I want to meet him. I want to meet him now. Can you take me there?"

I said, "Yeah, sure, I have the keys to the apartment.

"Let's go meet him,"

so we walked over to the gallery and, you know,

knocked on the apartment door.

This was during gallery hours.

Cy Twombly opens the door.

I said, "Cy, this is Jean-Michel Basquiat.

"He really wants to meet you. He's a big fan of yours."

And Jean was beginning to enter the apartment

when one of the partners came up and said, "How did he get here?

"Get him out now. Why is he here?"

I said, "Well, he wants to meet Cy."

"No, no, no, that's not going to happen.

"Now, I want, Brett, I want you to get him out immediately.

"Did he take anything?"

The word got out in the art world very quickly that there was

a genius working in Annina's basement.

But Jean-Michel, just hold on.

I think I have to ask you,

is this collage?

It's called Slave Auction.

A slave auction. In America, with the tobacco trade.

And this is a complete irony, you put a halo on top?

He's a martyr, he's, like, dead, you know.

It's like the boat, you know, this is a boat.

The boat that brings them from Africa, you know?

He's like, "Well, how much do I get for the slave here?

"How much do I get for him?"

$50 for the slave, you know.

And these, who are all those...?

These are people who are bidding on slaves. That's another slave.

People hear it was a kind of dungeon.

There were all these pictures and rumours

that she would keep him locked

in the basement to make paintings.

You know, for being a prison with a skylight and two windows,

that's kind of nice.

The story that you're always being locked in the basement

and ordered to paint? Oh...

That's just some...

It has a nasty edge to it, you know?

I was never locked anywhere.

I mean...

Oh, Christ. No, it's just...

If I was white they would have said artist in residence

rather than saying all that other stuff. You know?

I didn't see any chains in Annina's basement when he worked there,

that he seemed to be thriving,

although he was interrupted a lot of times when they would bring

Mick Jagger down to look and buy paintings from him.

I told him, "Look, I know what's going on,

"this is a good spot to work."

He didn't have an adequate studio space at that time

but I definitely told him, "I think you should raise up out of here."

I said, "I will help you to rent an apartment," which I did,

in Crosby Street, "and I will pay the rent,

"which I will take out of the sales," which is what I did.

I gave him 50% of whatever I sold.

You know, if I sold a painting for $10,000,

I gave him five.

In the period of 1981 to 1982...

..Jean-Michel was incredibly productive.

Perhaps 250 paintings.

At least 500 drawings.

He almost always had music on when he was working.

It was just very intuitive.

He would work on several paintings at one time.

He would paint the background or he might paint one line

and then he would go over to another and paint something

and then come back to this one and scratch it out or put words on it,

so it was a constant movement.

It was like a dance.

It was almost like he was channelling something.

He did many paintings, one after another, beautiful.

In the structure of these paintings,

there was a direct connection to No Wave music.

Seeming chaos that you hear in the best No Wave music,

Jean-Michel was able to articulate in the structure of his paintings.

They reflect a deep understanding of avant-garde writing and poetry.

The cut-up technique of William Burroughs,

to slice up and reconstitute writing into this new structure.

The zeitgeist was out there on the street.

The hip-hop community was bringing all this flash of the spirit,

all this colour and movement and kind of breaking with form.

Jean-Michel was also trying to channel the energy of his generation

into his canvases and into these gallery spaces.

Jean-Michel's work lays out so many of these essential innovations

in the structure of art, music and writing at the end of the '70s,

beginning of the '80s.

They were new but they had the classicism of modern art.

I never know how to really describe, except maybe...

I don't know how to describe my work.

It's like asking somebody, you know,

asking Miles, "How does your horn sound?"

You know, I don't think he could really tell you, you know,

why he played.

You know, why he played this at this point in the music or just...

it's sort of on automatic, you know, most of the time.

What this work had was

an astonishing directness

but part of the discourse around the work

was this unfortunate primitivist interpretation.

He was a sophisticated New York City kid

and it was part of the myth of

the noble savage, of the raw talent.

What it allowed certain people to do was to throw up their hands

in wonder and say, "Here's this miracle artist,

"we never expected anybody coming from where he comes from

"to be this good." The term primitive is purely racist.

Annina proceeded to offer Jean-Michel his first solo

New York gallery show in February 1982.

Everyone was just over the moon when they saw the work

and that show at Annina's.

Everything sold out immediately.

It just kind of all took off all at once.

It was just everything that he had dreamed of.

I'm just happy that I was able to stick it out

and get things I wanted. After...

I felt like I was right, you know what I mean?

All of a sudden we went from total poverty

to having so much money that we didn't know what to do with it.

There was money all over the house, hidden,

thousands of dollars because he didn't have a bank account.

We would have lavish parties with caviar,

with Cristal champagne, with cocaine.

When everyone in the art world starts looking at you

with expectations, you have to produce.

Drugs helped him, I think,

to work harder and longer hours and simultaneously

and made his mind free.

It might have helped him to have more endurance during the work.

Collectors were coming to the loft to look at the work

before it was even finished and it was very frustrating

because often they would want the painting to match their couch.

I saw him do things on Crosby Street,

there were these collectors who came in and brought him

a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

And he was so insulted that he told them basically,

"Get out, get out now, I'm not selling anything to you,"

and as they left, he was on the second floor,

he took this bucket of chicken and went over and dumped it

on the heads of these people leaving his studio.

And then he would start writing, "Not for sale," on the paintings.

He was very happy that he was selling his work

but he was also very put off

about the work being a commodity.

He struggled with that dichotomy

throughout his whole life.

I think he had a really interesting relationship with money.

It seemed, at some points, worthless to him.

I was with him in cabs where he would give $100 bills out

to squeegee guys on Bowery and Houston.

He wanted to just shock them with money.

There you go, sir. Thank very much. Drive safe. Have a nice holiday.

He came back to the East Village with all this money

and started spending it wildly and we were like, "Oh, wow, money."

There's a lot of jealousies and animosities at the time

that you could feel the pressure.

This camaraderie ended.

It didn't mean that I wasn't going to go for it too,

because I did, but it took out a lot of the fun.

I said to Annina, "If it's at all possible,

"I would love to do a show of Basquiat's paintings

"in my gallery in LA," which I had recently opened in West Hollywood.

So I bought first class tickets.

I can afford first class, so I'm not going to sit in first class

and have the artist sit in the back of the bus.

He had friends that were going to fly out with him,

standing out in the group was Rammellzee,

who had a white leather trench coat that was tagged all over the place

and he had ski goggles on and that's how he walked into first class.

We went up the spiral staircase to this lounge and the first thing

Basquiat does is pull out a big, fat joint and just lights it up.

The girl that was there to take our drink order, she was flabbergasted.

She says, "You can't." She kind of stammered out, you know,...

And he looked... This was typical Jean-Michel.

He looked up at her calmly

and he says, "Oh, I'm sorry, I thought this was first class."

You know, it was a long time ago but I'll never forget it.

And, hey, when we got there, we didn't get arrested,

got to LA in one piece.

Jean-Michel arrived and he walks in a room like a rock star, you know,

with his hair and his outfits.

It was just packed, the opening was packed.

It was a great turnout.

The word was out that this was a gifted artist

and also a charismatic artist.

I'm filming him in the opening. That's his first show in LA.

I was going to LA City College,

which is like the local city college for film.

And so I was doing that

and then working in the gallery.

Because I always had a camera in my hand, he's like,

"You should make a movie about me," and I was like, You know, whatever,

like, "Yeah, you're going to be some famous artist one day, why not?"

One canvas, he called it the LA Painting.

It was his anticipation of what LA was like.

It almost had like Chicano graffiti on it and blue sky.

Extraordinary painting.

I was just starting out. It was the beginning of my career

as an art dealer.

Getting a Basquiat show was definitely a coup

and definitely gave my gallery more visibility.

He was part of the jet set at that point,

after going to Los Angeles with Gagosian

and then going all over Europe

and starting to get shows in France, in Germany, in Tokyo.

At that point he started to say to me, "Brett, you've got to earn

"some more money so we can hang together."

He was 21 and he was

very well on his way to becoming

a millionaire from his art.

He would take limousines because taxis wouldn't stop for him.

I had never seen a black artist with this kind of unbelievable talent

and unbelievable charisma.

There was a lot of resentment, there was a lot of envy,

and it definitely had a racist edge to it.

I remember there was an artist I was friendly with and he had gone for

a dinner party at a collector's house and I said,

"What's their collection like?"

He says, "They have a really great collection, Larry," he said,

"The thing that fucks it up is they've got a Basquiat."

I understood that he wanted to show in the Fun Gallery

because it was in the Lower East side.

He feels maybe guilty that some people of his age,

some younger people,

were not about to make all the money

that he could make or the fame.

Where do the words come from?

Real life, books, television.

And you just skim them and start including certain...

No, when I'm working I hear them, I just throw them down.

It looked like he didn't want to be as famous as he was going to be.

I wanted to do some anatomy stuff.

And...

And then I went out and bought some books that were about anatomy.

And then you started imitating...

Well, not really imitating, because you know...

I use them as a source material.

So why did you want to do anatomy stuff?

Cos I felt like it.

Those images, things from Grey's Anatomy,

crop up all throughout his work.

It's kind of his Rosetta Stone, in a way, of imagery.

And Grey's Anatomy was his dictionary.

In May of '82, my assistant in New York called me up

and told me Basquiat left Annina Nosei's gallery.

Bischofberger saw the show PS1 and he was begging me to do a show

with him and I was being sort of, you know, like,

I was playing it cool, you know,

like telling him, you know, I didn't want to do it

and so on and so forth, you know.

I ask him, "Why did you leave Annina Nosei?"

And he told me, "I warned her several times

"that she should not sell my paintings which I leave down there

"before I sign them."

The idea that I sold them before they were finished,

it doesn't make any sense.

If he hadn't finished them, he wouldn't have given them to sell.

Whatever I sold had a slide and a number of the inventory.

In order to have that,

that meant that with Jean-Michel we called the photographer

and we had the photograph because the painting was finished.

He burned bridges repeatedly behind him

but it didn't seem to stop his forward movement.

You know, so many collectors were coming and Gagosian was there

all the time and they were taking paintings right out of the studio

and he was selling directly to them without a gallery.

He got paid in cash.

He got paid in drugs as well.

I never did that. I never did that.

This was a different time in the art world.

Every time an artist did a drawing,

you didn't get a triplicate contract from a lawyer.

He always had piles of cash in his studio in Crosby Street,

as well as cocaine and all sorts of drugs

and so that when you went there,

you never knew who you would encounter.

I became his exclusive worldwide dealer at the time with the promise

to find a partner in New York so that he could show also

in his hometown every now and then.

I did pay quite a lot in cash because he liked cash a lot

and it was not against the law to do that then.

And quite often me or my assistant brought him five or ten

or sometimes even $20,000, I don't know exactly how much it was.

I asked Basquiat, "Which gallery would you like best?"

He said, "Probably Mary Boone," he said, "Yes, yes, it's Mary."

Now, he was hot.

He was hot. He was this kid that had taken New York by storm.

He came into the gallery, it was 1982 and he wanted to show with me,

not because I was hot

but because he thought I showed a serious group of

painters that he wanted to be part of.

I toyed with whether it would be a good idea

to take this really young kind of

volatile artist into the gallery,

if that was not going to tip the scales to be too hot.

She wasn't even sure whether this artist, maybe,

is only a little fire who is extinguished soon.

When Warhol founded Interview Magazine

I was a co-owner of it, 25%.

Whenever I think an artist is really very promising, very good,

very great, he's glad, he takes my word for it,

he's glad to make a project of him.

I can invite them for lunch over there.

I saw Jean-Michel Basquiat.

He was brought by Bruno Bischofberger,

who was Andy's art dealer in Zurich and very close to Andy

and the Factory,

and so Andy took some Polaroids of Jean-Michel,

which is the way Andy started his portraits.

Basquiat asks me,

"Could you do a few pictures as well of Warhol and me together?"

So Warhol gave me his camera, it was this long camera,

and I make a few pictures

of Basquiat and Warhol standing together.

And then instead of having lunch,

Basquiat said he would like to go home to do something,

he can't stay for lunch.

And we were hardly getting up from lunch,

the assistant of Basquiat came running up

with a five-foot-square painting which he painted

after this Polaroid of the two of them.

We all gathered around to see this portrait of Andy

and there was not only a portrait of Andy, but a self-portrait

of Jean-Michel and they were absolutely stunning works.

He put it on the floor because it was still wet, you know,

so it wouldn't run around.

We'd all stand around and everybody liked it so much.

And Andy was like, "Oh, God!

"He goes so fast and these are so great, I mean,

"I didn't even send the Polaroids out to the lab yet!"

And Andy was looking at me, halfway smiling, halfway serious,

but still, he said, "Ooh, I'm so jealous. He's faster than me."

"Oh, God, Bruno, he's so great!"

We have a painting here, actually it's called Dos Cabezas.

It's here in the gallery.

When Andy died, it was sold at Sotheby's.

I bought it much more recently.

These were his unbelievable instincts as a painter.

He is showing Andy, in a way, his chops,

his talent and he lets Andy be the dominant presence in the portrait.

Really good portrait, good likeness of both of them,

particularly Andy, I must say.

And that was the beginning of everything

between Andy and Jean-Michel.

This was the haunt of Andy Warhol's and Interview Magazine

and that whole gang.

I started working at Interview Magazine.

We'd come here frequently and it's always a party in here

and everybody knew everybody else.

Jean-Michel had been showing at Annina Nosei earlier in 1982

but he had left so he was without a gallery.

And I'm not an art dealer but I'm an art enthusiast,

and Jean-Michel's painting was really story telling

in a really fresh way that I had never seen.

I was planning to do a show at the uptown place where I was living

in April of 1983 and he said yes right away,

he wanted to do the show.

I never put any pressure on him because I didn't have the overhead

of running the gallery, and that responsibility.

I don't think I've ever been swayed by what a dealer thinks

about an artist. I always listen to artists.

At this time, like, the spring of '84,

I was swayed to take Jean-Michel into my gallery

because of Brice Marden and Julian Schnabel's respect

for Jean-Michel's work.

I think that Jean-Michel was an original

and those were the kind of artists I wanted to show.

It was somewhere around that time when Julian Schnabel left

the gallery to go to Pace.

I was sitting at my desk and I was crying because I was sad

that Julian had left and Jean-Michel came into my little office,

which was smaller even than this room,

and put his arm around me and said, "Oh, Mary, don't worry.

"I'm going to be a much better artist than Julian will ever be."

It was an amazing first show.

So many people came.

A whole new group of collectors.

Most of the work went for $25,000 or less.

That's kind of normal for a young artist in their first show.

I was aware that Jean-Michel was

doing really well as an artist.

It was very important to Jean-Michel that he be regarded

as a great artist

versus a black artist,

while he was also incredibly

connected to the black experience

and to his blackness, because he was a black man.

There's a lot of people that are neglected in art.

I don't know if it's because who made the paintings

or what but, um...

..black people are never really portrayed realistically in...

Not even portrayed in modern art enough.

That Basquiat did not want to be seen as a black artist

is completely understandable.

Louise Bourgeois did not want to be seen as a feminine artist.

There are many artists who are homosexual

who do not want to be seen as gay artists, right?

Any artist who gets identified with a social group

finds themselves on the spot in ways that limits their freedom,

limits the understanding and interest in their work.

He was looking at his career and saying,

"I don't want to be pushed into this particular ghetto."

He was playing a very subtle game of, on the one hand,

again showing people things about a world they were largely ignorant of

and mostly afraid of and, at the same time,

doing it in idiom which was informed by the grand tradition.

This work that's just screaming revolutionary intentions, you know,

in terms of who it celebrates, who it valorises, who it trophies,

whose experience in culture and history

it completely embraces

as heroic and regal

and gutbucket at the same time.

There are really complicated matters that make us say,

"I don't want to be regarded as a black artist,

"or I want to be regarded as an American artist."

But, in fact, it is because of a certain kind of tragedy,

Jim Crow laws, lynching, and the civil rights

that Basquiat's work has the potency that it does

and that tragedy is no less black, and Haitian, and Puerto Rican,

and Brooklyn.

He filled his work full of energies and references to the very thing

that scared the shit out of a lot of the art world.

They wanted it because it was exciting,

but they didn't want it if it came in a package

and with a messenger who would make them feel more uncomfortable

than they already did.

Tonight, the furore continues over the death of Michael Stewart,

the young Brooklyn man who died 13 days after he was arrested

by transit police officers. Artists from the Lower East side picketed...

I knew Michael Stewart.

He was part of the downtown scene.

We all knew him.

Michael Stewart emulated Jean.

Michael Stewart cut his hair like Jean.

Michael and I were romantic friends.

I was not still with Jean-Michel when that happened,

when the Michael Stewart case happened.

I started dating Jean-Michel and then one night

we went to the Roxy and a friend of his came up

and told him about Michael Stewart being beaten to death.

Michael Stewart was brought to Bellevue Hospital unconscious

on the morning of September 15th.

He'd been arrested by transit police

for painting graffiti in a subway station.

The family charges the police beat up the young man.

The TA Police deny it.

Normally we'd go into the club and hang out for a while and dance.

He wanted to leave right away.

We went back to my apartment.

He was just drawing skulls all night.

He was so incensed about it.

He just said, "You're white. You would never understand.

"You can't imagine... You can't even talk about this.

"It just is so deep."

He was terrified that it could have been him.

I was very close to Michael.

I know in my heart

that Michael was murdered by the police.

I hate violence and I don't know why they killed him,

but they're not going to get away with it, that's for sure.

We were talking about more than a close friend of everybody's.

He was killed senselessly.

Madonna, Keith Haring, and then several galleries gave money

for Michael Stewart's legal defence fund

and I went to Jean-Michel and asked for money

and he was terrified that if he gave any money

that he would somehow be implicated

or that the police would come after him.

He kept saying, "It could have been me, it could have been me."

No one man against white supremacy

is going to end up being the winner.

People like James Brown and Nina Simone...

..who also had apprehension about being identified

as anti-authoritarian, radical black artists.

There's an anxiety because, you know, at that point,

how much of your success is dependent on a white audience.

In response to Michael Stewart's death,

Jean-Michel made a painting called Defacement.

With a painter who's that diaristic,

he saw himself there.

He saw the potential for his own annihilation

at the hands of authority.

Just as it was Michael Stewart,

it could have been Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was affected and...

..it was scary.

It was scary to see that that could happen.

It continues to be scary to see that these kind of things happen

and that young black men continue to be killed and treated

the way that they are and I know that it also deeply affected

and impacted Jean-Michel.

He had this real fear that he wasn't really allowed in

because it was a mostly white, affluent world.

New York Times Sunday magazine wanted an article

about the art market, and how it was exploding.

And my assignment was

to follow Jean-Michel Basquiat

as an exemplar of what was happening

to the art market in the early-1980s.

Kathleen McGuigan came to the gallery,

and approached me about doing a story on Jean-Michel,

and I think they loved him.

They loved the whole story that he was so young and that he was

full of all this energy,

and yet he also kind of tied into history.

He was only 24 years old at the time I interviewed him.

Andy Warhol told him it would be a good idea to do it.

He did also give me access.

You know, he let me watch him paint in his studio.

There was only a little glitch that they kept sending the photographer

to the studio to take a picture and Jean-Michel

didn't want to put on his shoes.

The editor of the magazine didn't see the irony in that,

so he just kept yelling and sending the photographer back.

"Get him to get his shoes on."

Finally, he calls me up and yells at me that I've got to get the artist

to put his shoes on.

I said, "He's a grown-up. If he doesn't want to put his shoes on,

"he's not going to put his shoes on."

That was a very peak moment for Jean-Michel Basquiat,

and then, of course, they got this really, really great image

and I think people remember the image almost more than anything.

It was really breakthrough for Jean-Michel and he knew it.

He knew he had made it.

He was so proud of it,

he went out and bought stacks and stacks of New York Times.

And Andy was reading it right up next to his face,

and he was really blown away by it.

I think he would have liked to have been on the cover.

Jean-Michel's father decided to have a dinner at his town house in

Brooklyn and Jean-Michel invited Andy and myself.

I think Andy Warhol coming over to the house for dinner

is pretty cool, really cool.

I was probably about 14 years old

and I barely knew who Andy Warhol was.

So, for me, it was just this kind of this eccentric friend

that he was bringing over to the house.

It was a little dinner.

It was Jean-Michel and Gerard

and Nora and Andy and myself.

A really sweet dinner, and it was really fun.

And the item for dinner was stuffed fillet of sole.

I thought it would be so great if Basquiat and Warhol

would do works together.

Every artist would have dreamt of doing collaborations with the most

famous artist on earth.

So I asked Basquiat, "Would you like to do such a thing?"

He said, "Of course, immediately. What do you think?"

I mean, this is your big chance.

For what? For nothing.

Nobody sees this painting.

There's never been anything like this,

this kind of collaboration of the two artistic giants

of different generations.

I think that Andy Warhol was a great influence on Jean-Michel.

He didn't do drugs.

Maybe in Andy's attempts to get Basquiat off drugs,

he was trying to redeem himself in the eyes of all of those,

including some others at The Factory,

who felt he had pushed people to the edge.

Andy was paternal but there's jealousy and rivalry

going on all the time.

I mean, I like the way, you know,

here we're doing some work together and you paint me out.

Where did I paint you out?

Where? Everything I've done, you've painted me out.

Where? Well... Where? Where?

I think, in some ways, Andy Warhol might have been his art father.

Andy is a peculiar father to have.

And also, Andy was competitive and when he made these paintings

with Basquiat, he was competing with his son.

Now, that's great in certain ways, in other ways maybe not so great.

You didn't give us enough to paint out. Oh, OK.

Here is the painting called Clear Boy,

a collaboration done between Warhol and Basquiat.

So, Warhol did the logos of all kind of different products,

like the General Electric logo here, the Ford automobile logo.

Basquiat convinced Warhol to start hand-painting again.

For 23 years, he had only used silk screen.

And Basquiat, in silk screen technique,

seen in these two bananas.

So, they reversed the techniques.

Basquiat used silk screen and Warhol painted by hand.

So, this is where the famous exhibition

of the collaboration paintings of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat

first took place at my gallery in 1985.

I haven't been here in 30-odd years.

Wow!

The poster for the exhibition of Warhol and Basquiat

was one million percent my idea.

I got a call from Paige Powell

asking me if I wanted to come to a dinner

that Andy was giving at Texarkana.

I showed up a little late.

The one empty seat was right next to Jean-Michel.

And the second I sat down, he said,

"Oh, I've been a fan of your work for five years.

"That portrait you made of Klaus Nomi,

"I've loved your work from the portrait you made of Klaus Nomi."

And I realised, wow, that's five years ago.

That's incredible. He really is for real.

So, this is the camera I used for the sitting.

And I've had it since my 21st birthday.

He explained that they had this idea to make this poster.

And then he said, you know, "Would you be interested

"in making the picture for it?"

I said, "Um, sure."

In my mind, I thought, "This is never going to happen."

I placed them right about here.

Jean turned to Andy, who was sitting at the head of the table,

and he yelled across to Andy and said,

"Michael's going to make that picture for the poster."

And Andy said, "Oh, wow!

"We already asked Robert Maplethorpe to do that."

And Jean said, "No, Michael's going to do it."

And he said, "Wow, great!

"I love Michael's work, I love Michael's portraits."

Andy just seemed to be almost like a mannequin.

I noticed that Jean was very comfortable moving Andy around

physically and telling him what to do.

This was interesting for me to see that he was comfortable with Andy

in a way that I hadn't witnessed anybody be with him,

which was kind of nice.

There was a dividing wall here and, um, you could go round one painting

hanging here as you entered.

And, er, the famous photograph of the two of them together, standing.

Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel, next to each other, back-to-back,

right here. Then you come into the larger room,

where the larger paintings were.

And this is the huge painting with a big piece of steak

that Warhol had painted.

And Jean-Michel turned the steaks into mountains

with skiers sloping down the mountains with a crocodile

or two at the bottom.

And this is where the two of them sat down

and a television documentary was made from England.

Then the other big painting being here was the famous painting

of the large dentures and head.

Boy, it was a great, great show.

One of the greatest shows, I think, of the last 100 years.

Andy Warhol was the great master of the '60s, '70s and '80s,

and befriended Jean-Michel.

And now the world was coming to see the collaboration paintings.

The paintings were far too radical then.

They're still radical now.

The world wasn't ready for it then and the response was not that great.

Jean had called me to come and have brunch with him.

It was the weekend after the opening of the exhibition

at Tony Shafrazi's.

That day, he had the New York Times

and he was excited to read the review.

And then, after he finished reading the review, he kind of...

His mood collapsed.

He just became really upset.

It definitely painted this picture

of him being portrayed as Andy's mascot...

..and being really used by Andy.

Jean-Michel felt violated that he was called Andy's mascot,

and, erm...

Because he was already established.

I think he felt he was going backwards.

He really, really took it very hard

and he expressed he would never talk to Andy again.

That was it. He was done with Andy.

I think Jean became very paranoid and suspicious of even Andy

and felt that Andy had this reputation of being a vampire

and feeding off of younger artists and needing new blood

to infuse his own career.

About a month later,

I was photographing Andy for Giorgio Armani and then the conversation

shifted into Andy asking me about Jean-Michel,

and he was really concerned about him and wanting to know

if he was OK. He was very concerned that he was possibly

going to be self-destructive with the way he felt about this review.

He said, "I've been trying to reach him and I can't reach him.

"Is there a way?

"Could you tell him that I'd like to talk to him about it?"

I said, "OK, I'll try."

Andy kept saying, like we'd go out to dinner and he'd say,

"Do think we should call Jean-Michel?"

I said, "Well, Andy, you've tried before and he doesn't want to go."

I mean... I just said to him, "Andy, he deserted you.

"He deserted you."

Jean started to doubt himself

and started to feel like there was a turn in the critical response

to his work.

I like to try to remain a little reclusive, not just be out there,

to be brought up, and be brought down, like they do to most of them.

I can't think of one big celebrity type person

they haven't done that to.

He was somebody who understood the value of his own work

and always knew it and never really kind of doubted that

until he was, I think, weakened by some of the drugs that he took

in the later part of his life.

The night that Andy died, he came into Indochine.

I was a waitress at that point.

And he stands in the middle of the dining room, sobbing.

He was inconsolable.

He said, "I'll never fucking get over this."

Crying hysterically.

He was like, "You've got to come with me."

I was like, "I can't, I'm working.

"I'm going to get fired if I leave in the middle of the shift."

The buzzer went and it was about 2am and it was frantic.

It was absolutely frantic.

My new boyfriend said, "Who is it?"

Jean-Michel, in a frantic voice, said,

"It's Jean-Michel, it's Jean-Michel. Is Suzanne there? Is Suzanne there?"

And I said, "Let him in, he's probably in trouble.

"He was probably mugged or something. Let him in."

And we buzzed him in.

And he never came up.

He felt guilty cos he dropped Andy.

And then he really got into drugs.

Jean-Michel came running from his studio all the way here,

he'd come to see me in my office.

He entered there. Laid down, crying, he was crying, poor guy.

Crying, confessing, that he'd cleaned up, it was all fine,

it was all going to be good from now on.

In the case of Jean,

like, the only person he listened to about drugs was Andy.

You know, I used to think, well, you know,

a separation of church and state, you know, you just...

You owe the artist the money,

you give it to them and it's not your business how they spend it.

And now I feel more like if someone's hurting themselves...

..if I could have done anything to prevent that from happening...

..I would have, and should have.

I rented a house in Hawaii.

You know, everybody kind of understood why we were doing this,

because it would be a healthier environment for Jean-Michel.

He liked Hawaii and I think sometimes Paige would stay with him.

He really loved spending time there.

It was a great way for him to escape the city.

It just had everything there.

They had horses, a horse stable

and different houses on it

and beautiful tropical fruit trees.

But also he didn't do hard drugs over there.

It was really great to see him in that world, too,

because he was so happy.

He would never... I never saw him upset when he was in Hawaii.

It was like a sanctuary for him.

It wasn't so much that he wanted to go back to New York,

or back to LA to, you know, get some harder drugs,

I think it was that he couldn't work there.

Basquiat's art is full of many of death's heads.

There are many skulls.

There are many faces that seem to have, you know,

skeletal structures behind them.

Some of that may simply come from how he looked at Gray's Anatomy

and lots of skeletons.

But some of it is there as intimations of mortality,

if not an actual death wish.

Like a lot of the great artists,

they are very aware of their mortality

and contrast the life force with the inevitability of death.

And that's central to Jean-Michel.

The many paintings that you see that give you a skull,

or skull and bones, or give you anatomy,

they're very much about kind of a symbolic gutting of black males

in American society.

Jean-Michel invited all his old friends at the show

he had at Baghoomian in 1988.

He was very affectionate.

The whole show was like a prophecy of his death.

And there is a big painting of the death on a horse.

Well, the painting Riding With Death

is, undoubtedly, an existential cry of some kind.

It's a hard painting to look at.

What I saw was an incredible amount of pain.

It just was a very clear and very profound view...

..into some of what Jean-Michel was thinking about at that time.

There is also another big painting that says, "Man dies, man dies."

That that embraced not just goodbye for the summer vacation,

it was like a goodbye.

Already I felt it.

I got a call from Jean's housekeeper.

I was out on Long Island at the beach and she called and said,

"Jean-Michel's very sick.

"He's sweating, the room is very hot, there's no air conditioning...

"..and he has foam coming out of his mouth."

And I said, "Well, what are you...? You know, call 911."

Someone called me and told me Jean-Michel died.

And I said, "When?" And they told me and I was like, "Oh, my God."

I wished it had have been me there when he overdosed because...

I wish it had have been me, now as a doctor,

cos I would have revived him.

So in my mind, I play with time sometimes, and I wish.

It's amazing and humbling how Jean-Michel speaks to

not only my generation

but the generation of my children

and how powerful his voice is

even 30 years later.

Whether we're talking about Charlie Parker or Jimi Hendrix,

there's a romantic aspect of drugs

in terms of Jean-Michel being linked to the inspiration of his heroes.

His career goes beyond just a normal career, becomes mythic.

I mean, he died at...

He was 27 in 1988.

People are buying into that whole myth in addition to buying his work.

Thank you, Yuki. Congratulations.

What's interesting about the auction breaking $100 million

is that I feel like the rest of the world only understands greatness

by these consolidated values that happen through the market.

But it confirms something that many of us already knew -

how important he was to the legacy of American art.

I wish my brother were here today.

This may have been what to happen

in order for his voice to be as powerful as it is today.