How Madonna’s junkie ex became an art hero — with piece fetching £85.4million 29 years after he died of a heroin overdose
An unknown Madge dated the budding painter the same year the masterpiece was created
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT always believed that heroin would make him a superstar artist and on Thursday night he was finally proved right – 29 years after his death.
A painting by the junkie, who once hawked sketches on the street for a few pounds, was sold for £85.4million — the highest sum ever paid at auction for an American work.
The spray-paint and oil 1982 picture of a skull, called Untitled, has the kind of wild energy that drew in early fans, including his then-unknown girlfriend Madonna.
She was working on her breakthrough debut album at the time of their short-lived relationship the same year the painting was created.
But the singer, now 58, feared the worst for her lover.
She later recalled: “He wouldn’t stop doing heroin. He was an amazing man and deeply talented — I loved him.
“When I broke up with him he made me give [the paintings he gave me] back to him. And then he painted over them black.”
Less than six years later Basquiat was dead of a heroin overdose in his Manhattan studio, aged just 27.
I’m on heroin. I guess you don’t approve of that but I have decided the true path to creativity is to burn out
It came as no surprise to anyone who knew him.
Martin Aubert, one of the artist’s old schoolmates, recalled bumping into him in 1980 when he was 19.
He said: “He was covered with paint and shivering.
"He said, ‘I’m on heroin. I guess you don’t approve of that but I have decided the true path to creativity is to burn out’.
“He mentioned Janis Joplin, Hendrix, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker.
"I said, ‘All those people are dead, Jean.’
"He said, ‘If that’s what it takes . . .’
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The following year Basquiat held his first one-man art show, after running into pop art icon Andy Warhol and dazzling him with samples of his work.
It was a hit. Soon his paintings were selling for up to £7,700 each — with the cash going straight towards heroin.
One former fellow addict recalled: “He had a legendary habit. It gave him a lot of cachet. He would drop $20,000 or $30,000 at a time.
“We’re talking ounces, not stuff that had been cut and put in bags.
"The expectation was quite general that he wasn’t going to be around for much longer.”
A lengthy affair with half- English girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk was also blighted.
She said: “Jean always did drugs, he never stopped.
“Whenever he went to Europe or Japan or any new place you could count on it that in a couple of hours upon arriving he knew where to buy what he wanted.
"It was like he had a radar for it.”
But Basquiat also found time to befriend stars including Debbie Harry and David Bowie — who went on to play Andy Warhol in a 1996 movie about his pal’s short life.
And he won the hearts of strangers by random acts like hurling 100 dollar bills out of the window of his limo as he drove through Manhattan.
It was all a far cry from his middle-class upbringing in Brooklyn with an accountant dad and an art-buff mum.
Puerto Rican-born Matilda, who spoke French, Spanish and English, took him around New York’s galleries, fostering his own love of art.
But the couple split up when the youngster was seven.
Graffiti’s street cred
By Toulouse Le Plot, Sun Art Critic
YOU’RE out of your skull if you think the writing is on the wall for the art market.
The huge price tag of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work proves there is plenty of mileage in street art.
It is a pure example of extremely physical graffiti, full of energetic strokes and violent motifs – or to use the technical jargon, squiggles and splashes.
He lived with his Haitian-born dad Gerard and the two endured a troubled relationship before the artist-to-be ran away at 15.
He slept on park benches, experimented with LSD and sold hand-painted T-shirts and postcards on the street.
The teen also began to paint graffiti, signing his work SAMO, which he would say meant, “Same old s**t”.
By contrast, this week the work sold by Sotheby’s in New York to Japanese billionaire collector Yusaku Maezawa was being called a modern masterpiece.
The auction house’s head of contemporary art, Gregoire Billault, said of its appeal: “I’ve never seen so much emotions in such a painting.”