Remembering Jean-Michel Basquiat and Scrubbing Grime From His Headstone

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/nyregion/jean-michel-basquiat-headstone.html

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Beneath a modest headstone at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat continues to draw crowds.

Basquiat, who was born in Brooklyn, achieved a milestone in May when his 1982 painting of a skull sold for $110.5 million, making it the sixth most expensive artwork ever sold at an auction.

On Thursday, Basquiat was paid a more down-to-earth homage when four French volunteers arrived at his resting place in the southeast corner of the vast Brooklyn cemetery to clean the grime from his granite headstone. The artist died in August 1988 at 27 of a heroin overdose in his East Village apartment and art studio.

The volunteers — three university students and a teacher from Paris, St.-Étienne and Alsace — were part of an exchange program sponsored by Preservation Volunteers.

“I think we have to care, faire attention, for the dead,” said Fada Mouzaoui, 53, a primary-school teacher in France.

Ms. Mouzaoui said she had joined the preservation group to combine tourism in New York City with meaningful work. Helping scrub Basquiat’s headstone was emotional, she said, as she remembered her visit to an exhibition of his work in Switzerland.

“I liked his way of painting with real energy,” Ms. Mouzaoui said as she took a break from washing other headstones nearby.

The group worked under a searing sun, soaking Mr. Basquiat’s headstone with a cleaning solution and scrubbing its surface with brushes to remove moss and the wax stains from candles.

Basquiat’s gray headstone, tucked into a row of almost identical ones, dried under the sun, revealing its carvings: his name, the dates of his birth and death, and a one-word epitaph — “ARTIST.”

The volunteers helped restore windows at the Conference House on Staten Island last week and on Monday began working at Green-Wood Cemetery, where they cleaned the headstones of different artists each day.

The 478-acre cemetery is the resting place for more than 400 artists and other acclaimed people, including Frank Morgan, who played the Wizard in “The Wizard of Oz”; Leonard Bernstein, the conductor and composer; and Elias Howe, who invented the sewing machine.

Before splashing water on Basquiat’s gravestone, the volunteers removed trinkets visitors had left: a white flower, a blue poker chip, a guitar pick, notes scrawled in English and French. “I am powerful because you are powerful,” one visitor wrote. Basquiat’s grave is one of the most visited in the cemetery.

“It’s pretty modest when it comes down to it, but it still deserves the same type of work,” said Neela Wickremesinghe, manager of restoration and preservation at the cemetery.

Basquiat, who grew up in Bushwick, began drawing on sheets of paper his father, an accountant, brought from his office. His mother would take him to the Brooklyn Museum, “giving him access to literacy in art,” said Frances Negrón-Muntaner, director at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University.

“His ultimate destination, where he wanted to be recognized and known, was going to be Manhattan, the corridors of art,” Ms. Negrón-Muntaner added.

Basquiat started as a graffiti artist spray-painting foundations in SoHo under the tag “SAMO” before achieving one-man shows in Paris, Tokyo and Düsseldorf. At the time, he was one of only a handful of celebrated black artists in the United States.

His primitive, boldly colored figures on canvases and on ordinary objects such as doors and refrigerators were exalted by critics for their composition and for striking a balance between spontaneity and control.

The major themes of his work — segregation, power structures, slavery, colonialism, class struggles — drew from his upbringing in the Caribbean and African-diaspora communities in Brooklyn, Ms. Negrón-Muntaner said.

On a tree stump several feet from Basquiat’s grave visitors have carved outlines of crowns with three peaks, his trademark symbol.

The origin of the crown is a subject of debate. His father has said the artist used it to signify that he came from royalty; others say it came from his time as a street artist.

“It’s a way for him to create this pantheon of art genius,” Ms. Negrón-Muntaner suggested. “He succeeded in making people see him as king.”