The Basquiat Exhibit at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Neuilly

Yesterday, I visited the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Neuilly and it was daggone amazing! This has been on my to do list for years but I could never seem to come up with the admission fee. It's not a question of being cheap. It's a question of priorities. I could have gone but it would have meant giving up something else and I could never justify it until now.

But it so happens that one of my students is a VIP big shot at a major French company and she had a ticket just lying around that someone sent her, and as fate would have it, that ticket had my name on it, and she gave it to me, just like that. I was talking to her about my art and she got up and just gave me this ticket. It was unbelievable. I actually couldn't believe her generosity any more than I could believe I was actually going to finally get to go to the Louis Vuitton Fondation. The building alone is an architectural feast done by Frank Gehry, for crying out loud. OMG.

And so my first visit was for the Basquiat exhibit. I confess I had only heard his name, I never really knew anything about this young Hatian-American artist who died at only 27 years old from a heroin overdose in his studio in Manhattan. And the few excerpts I had seen of his work, I kind of just dismissed him as this messed up drug-addict who was given a "token" recognition in the art world.

Well, let me tell you something. Shame on me for not knowing more about this guy. This guy was a genius. The body work on display at the gallery in Neuilly was staggering and it did not even represent half of the stuff he did. Apparently he painted over 1500 artworks in his short career! 1500! OMG. But, even so, you can see in each and every one, a theme, a style, a look, an originality. You can identify a Basquiat without having to look for his signature. Drugs can't do this. At least, I don't think so. My sense of drugs is that it just creates chaos in the mind. There clearly was chaos in his mind but there was also total order. So he knew exactly what he was doing every single time he picked up a paintbrush. There was no schizophrenia there. There was no confusion.  There was only a man who knew his genius and just kept exploiting it on a canvass every chance he got.

But that was not all, because like me, he also painted banana. I was absolutely stunned to see this. And they are similar! And I had never, ever seen his work! But guess what? Our birthdays are a day apart. He is December 22 and I am Decembre 23. So…..

By Marion TD Lewis

By Basquiat

So, anyway, I LOVE the way he just painted on everything. I often have thought of that, like when I am walking on the street and I see a discarded door, for example. I have thought, "Why don't you pick that up and bring it home and paint over it?" But I have always stopped myself because I have always worried that maybe it was a little bit insane. Besides, can you imagine me packing up this over-stuffed studio with discarded doors and other garbage?? It IS insane.

But. I can tell you this:

the next time I see a door on the street, am bringing that puppy home and doing a paint job in it like Basquiat did. He was totally fearless with his art, clearly. I look around at the stuff I have painted and I'm just like OMG. How boring you are, Marion!  The thing is, even though I admire his genius, am awed by his talent, I don't want to paint like Basquiat, except insofar as I would like to be a bit more fearless. But I don't want to do that kind of bizarreness that he does so well because, well, the construction of my mind is just not that. You have to see the image, I think, before you can paint it. Which, I guess, is where the drugs came in with him. I think you have to be on a lot of fucking drugs to see those types of images, frankly. But I don't think the drugs are what made his art so amazing. I think first, his mind was amazing and then he took the drugs and it just expanded that to another level, and then he died.

Well, so that's it. I recommend this exhibit highly. It was bloody incredible.