By Mateo Sancho Cardiel

New York, Apr 3 (EFE).– He was among the most influential yet one of the shortest-lived artists of the second half of the 20th century, but the complicated mind of Jean-Michel Basquiat, which raised him to fame and plunged him into self-destruction, has a roadmap in the eight hand-written notebooks being exhibited starting Friday at the Brooklyn Museum.

“Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks” is the name of this not very visual exhibition that will be open until Aug. 23 and which offers a curious tour of the writings, bits of poems, plays on words, personal observations and sketches that he never considered publishing.

“At first I thought, what will we do with all this? They’re not inherently beautiful objects,” one of the curators of the exhibition, Tricia Laughlin Bloom, told Efe.

“But if you take the time, you connect with a very sensitive, delicate person. A brilliant poet. A person who wanted to be socially accepted, but also to have fun. You see what he was thinking,” she said.

Basquiat (1960-1988), born in Brooklyn of Caribbean parents and the most popular black artist of the 1980s, used words in some of his graffiti and canvases, but on paper, sometimes with a ball-point pen, he explored the limits of language and the expressive power of calligraphy.

“He used repetition and created a kind of visual poem,” she said, such as the sheet of paper on which he wrote “Loveisalie. Lover=Liar.” A clear enough message, but also an image decorated with vowels and the letter “l.”

He also wrote lists of words, as if going back to the time when at the age of 8 he was hurt in a car accident and spent his time recovering in bed reading “Gray’s Anatomy.” “He got a little obsessed with the classifications and diagrams, something that can be seen in his later work,” Bloom said.

He also addressed in his writing “the subjects that concerned him, from everyday things to wider social questions like racism, Vietnam and social inequality.” But he always “needed time to develop his message,” she said.

Basquiat continually played at appearances, and despite coming from a good family that sent him to the best schools, he had a famous taste for spelling words wrong. “He changed letters, he covered them, he wrote sentences backwards. For him language was not something static, it was something we change and play with,” Bloom said.

On the other hand, he was an insatiable, unprejudiced reader, a lover both of popular classics like Mark Twain and Herman Melville, and cult writers like William S. Burroughs. Similarly, he loved Madonna and was a close friend of Andy Warhol.

“He was like a radio that could broadcast many different stations,” Bloom said of the artist who died at age 27 of an overdose of heroin. EFE