MONTREAL.- To fully appreciate Jean-Michel Basquiat’s art is to understand the outsize role that music played in his life and work.

“Understanding the art of Jean-Michel depends in part on understanding his lifelong involvement with music — literally his working ambient,” wrote Robert Farris Thompson in “Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat.”

The New York-born-and-bred artist was a regular in the city’s nightclubs and music venues and reportedly amassed roughly 3,000 records during his short life, which ended at 27 in 1988.

That connection forms the foundation of “Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music,” an exhibition showing from Oct. 15 through Feb. 19 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The show will then travel to the Musée de la Musique’s Philharmonie de Paris in France from April 6 through July 30. The museums also worked with Dieter Buchhart, a frequent collaborator of the Basquiat estate.

The show was organized between the two museums.

Stretching across the museum’s third floor are more than 100 paintings, drawings and multimedia works by Basquiat along with photographs, sound and film clips and archival documents. The show examines the artist’s engagement with music, not just as listener or performer, but as the medium through which he tangled with the thematics of the African diaspora and the uniquely American politics of race.

The show explores the sounds that shaped Basquiat as he came of age in New York in the 1970s and 80s. Mary-Dailey Desmarais, the Montreal Museum of Art’s chief curator, recalled the edgy appeal of the artist’s stomping grounds on the Lower East Side of Manhattan during her own teenage years during that latter decade.

That research took the curatorial team many places, including East 12th Street in Manhattan where, in a sixth-floor walk-up apartment, Alexis Adler has kept many of the albums she remembers listening to with “Jean” during the months they lived there when they were dating.

In a recent video call, Adler noted that while her apartment is a frequent stop for Basquiat curators, she believes that this new exhibition in Montreal highlights “different aspects of Jean that haven’t been explored.”

With marked delight, Adler pulled out the records she recalled them enjoying together, piling up albums by the Velvet Underground, James Brown, Kraftwerk, Lou Reed, Sugar Hill Gang, Fela Kuti, Black Uhuru, Duke Ellington, Curtis Mayfield, Madonna, Ornette Coleman, George Clinton, Grace Jones, Afrika Bambaataa and nearly every early David Bowie recording.

Some records reminded her of live shows back in the day. “We saw James Brown together, me and Jean. It was at Irving Plaza,” Adler recalled, adding that they danced the whole night.

She remembered attending one of Madonna’s first performances in New York with Basquiat. The artist dated the performer soon after.

“Seeing Loud” especially illuminates Basquiat’s career as a performer and musician, notably with the band Gray, a “noise band,” as Adler put it, that she recalled rehearsing in the apartment. Basquiat’s fellow band member and friend Michael Holman did an extensive interview for the exhibition and is also taking part in some of the museum’s extensive live programming.




Dozens of Polaroids by photographer Maripol add further visual texture that connects Basquiat not just to musicians such as Debbie Harry and Madonna but also Fab 5 Freddy, John Lurie, Grace Jones, Sade and band members of groups including the B52s and Siouxsie and the Banshees. There is also a showcase of videos, including in Blondie’s music video for “Rapture” in which Basquiat makes a cameo.

But “Seeing Loud” is more than biographical; it explores how Basquiat’s passion as a listener and performer translated into an equally passionate effort to depict the complexities and emotion of music into visual media, especially painting. In 1981, Basquiat was included in the P.S. 1 show “New York/New Wave” and narrowed his focus to the studio-based painting practice that made him one of the most coveted artists in recent history.

In the painting “Anybody Speaking Words” (1982), he painted ladders and arrows going both up and down near the figure’s torso to suggest the vocal range of an opera singer. Another painting, “Toxic” (1984), serves as a visual representation of hip-hop: Basquiat cut up and collaged copies he made of his own drawings, much in the same way hip-hop producers sample and chop up existing songs “to create a new rhythm,” Desmarais said.

Basquiat’s connections to New York’s nightclub scene also have their place in “Seeing Loud.”

At a time when clubs often showcased visual art, in addition to frequenting clubs, Basquiat contributed to the look of places such as the now-defunct venues Tier 3 and Area with murals, marketing materials, and — on view in Montreal — a series of collaged and painted wooden boxes he designed that reference jazz.

With its wall of artsy flyers advertising concerts and club nights, “Seeing Loud” makes much of this now nearly lost form of advertising that also functioned as a kind of public art.

Those who came of age with or before Basquiat’s generation in New York or other U.S. cities with underground music scenes will recall flyers taped or stapled to every possible piece of street architecture and in the windows of record stores and other local establishments. It was the main way to attract crowds to concert and dance halls.

Some of the flyers on view were designed by Basquiat himself, while others merely advertise events he is likely to have attended.

“The techniques that were used for doing flyers were some of the techniques that were used in his very first works,” including collage and photocopying, added Vincent Bessières, who is curating the Paris leg of the exhibition.

There are also records with graphics and typefaces — particularly from the Savoy and the Keynote recordings of Charlie Parker and Lester Young — that had a visual resonance of the kind Basquiat would aim to achieve in his own art.

While “Seeing Loud” is on view, the Montreal museum has also varied planned programs and performances as sundry as Basquiat’s own musical interests. In addition to several DJ sets, highlights include a show in tribute to Basquiat’s love for bebop with saxophonist Charles McPherson, a disciple of Charlie Parker; a concert in recognition of Basquiat’s love for the music and storytelling traditions of West Africa that will unite four Montreal-based griots, each descended from families of the Mandinka Empire; and a performance by Ira Coleman, joining jazz with the music of the Mandinka in the improvisation that unites both traditions.

The museum will also screen a series of thematically related films, including the documentary “Beyond the Notes” (2018) about the influential jazz label Blue Note records, and the movie “Downtown 81,” starring Basquiat alongside Harry that had been described by the Times as “a nostalgic portrait of pre-Giuliani Manhattan, an unruly place full of garbage, graffiti, rubble-strewn lots, unlicensed after-hours clubs and highly idealistic kids eager to make their mark as avant-garde artists and musicians.”

Similar programs are anticipated when the exhibition, renamed “Basquiat Soundtracks,” arrives in Paris in the spring.

Basquiat’s affection for the city was mutual: Paris named a square after the artist in the 13th Arrondissement, an area of the city vibrant with the street art similar to that through which Basquiat first found fame in the city of his birth.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.