So I came across these gorgeous Tseng Kwong Chi photos of Basquiat, Warhol, and Haring the other day and they just rubbed a little salt in my wound of having missed the big Basquiat blockbuster at Gagosian this spring. In case you missed it too, here’s the rather staid official gallery walk-through followed by funnier one of art blogger James Kalm getting himself kicked out of the gallery for filming with a spy-cam:

It’s been interesting to read reviews and press — and simply to take in the numbers of people this thing attracted: 1,000+ on weekdays and 4,000+ on the weekends. Sotheby’s posted a little reevaluation of the artist’s “rise” just about the time the show closed. It’s interesting to see how the biography continues to shift as time passes. Now Mary Boone’s pretty sure he was bipolar, for instance:

Boone remembers a shy, sensitive young man. The perception of Basquiat as a “wild child in an expensive suit” is off base – though Boone does admit that he dropped $10,000 at Armani so that he would look sharp for his opening. “This guy was not stupid,” she says. “He knew exactly what he was doing. His paintings weren’t accidents.”

The first memory that comes to Boone, however, is a day in 1984 when one of her most prized artists announced his defection, and Basquiat comforted her. “Julian Schnabel had just left the gallery and I was crying in my office, and Jean-Michel comes in and puts his arm around me and says, ‘Mary, don’t cry,’” she says. “And he said something like, ‘I’m a much better artist than Julian.’” Then, in a gesture aimed to cheer her up while making fun of a cliché about blacks, he went out and bought her a watermelon.

Nearly 30 years later, Basquiat’s beguiling combination of boyish charm and utter cockiness still puts a smile on Boone’s face. She recounts his fondness for pink champagne and his habit of burying his telephone in the laundry basket; when she needed to speak to him, she’d send a hand-written note, “Please call me.” His untimely death still haunts her. In retrospect, Boone says she believes he may have been bipolar and, like others with that psychiatric disorder, turned to illegal drugs in an attempt to self-medicate. She also says she has come to view her own role in her artists’ lives differently: “Now I no longer think my responsibility is just to make money for my artists. If I see them going in a bad direction, 
I say something.”

Earlier people just thought he was difficult, arrogant, and/or damaged. Exploiting and exploited. Turned into a jerk by money and fame. Ground up and spit out. One thing’s clear, though, and that’s the consensus for his canonization. And the fact that auction prices will continue to go up, up, up.

So I’m curious to know who among you got to see the show? And what you thought?

It may be worth pointing out that Tamra Davis’s Radiant Child (2010) is available in full on Netflix or YouTube. A fun companion piece to the Schnabel, which is worth revisiting if you haven’t seen it lately.