When the American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat died from an overdose of cocaine and heroin in 1988, he was only 27 years old. He didn't even make it to the end of the boom decade that had brought him brief, brilliant celebrity. In fact, by the time of his death his 15 minutes of fame were already long gone. He was taking too many drugs to produce any work, and the art world had moved onto the next big thing.
As ever, though, dying young was a good career move. The handsome young martyr was hurriedly canonised by the establishment and confirmed as a blue chip investment. Julian Schnabel, the 1980s star who survived his moment of cultural eminence, and still produces work, is a more dubious economic proposition.
"Everything that happened in the 1980s had to do with greed and speed," one of Basquiat's dealers, Mary Boone, said of him. "Basquiat was an artist who epitomised the 1980s even more than Schnabel." It's appropriate that Phoebe Hoban's recently published biography, Basquiat, A Quick Killing in Art, is as much a vivid account of the frenetic New York art scene of the time as of the life of the hapless painter. In particular, it provides a compelling insight into the workings of an omnivorous market that took a naive young talent and ate him alive.
Not that Basquiat was as naive as all that. Like Picasso, Andy Warhol and many another cultural legend, he invented his own myth. Black, handsome, a cultural outsider, he liked to give the impression that he was a poor street kid and was obligingly, and patronisingly, viewed as an innocent savage, "a wild boy raised by wolves", in a predominantly white, middle class milieu.
In fact his father was an accountant, based in Brooklyn, who had emigrated from Haiti in 1955, and his mother was from Puerto Rico. What is true is that Basquiat was a damaged individual from childhood, his sense of self undermined by a troubled relationship with his fickle, indifferent, sometimes violent father. His mother, he said, suffered from depression and spent a lot of time in institutions.
From an early age he drew compulsively, but his first artworks in the public arena were neatly lettered, cryptic slogans sprayed on the walls of lower Manhattan. His partner in this enterprise was Al Diaz and their signature was SAMO, an abbreviation for "same old shit". This was in the late 1970s, at the height of the graffiti art phenomenon but, unlike the graffiti artists per se, SAMO didn't spray subway carriages, and Basquiat never applied the term graffiti artist to himself.
He didn't disguise his ambition and frequently remarked that he was going to be a famous artist. The irony was that he was actually struggling desperately to survive, getting by on coins collected from nightclub floors and the kindness of acquaintances and strangers. It seems likely that he also resorted to prostitution around Times Square. Even in the exotic environment of the clubs he cut a conspicuous figure, sporting a blond Mohican haircut, a garishly painted overcoat and dancing in a curious, solitary, robotic way.
His big breakthrough came in 1981, when he was the star of New York/New Wave, a group exhibition at the city's most important alternative art space, P.S. 1 in Queens. Public, dealers and critics all responded to his rough-hewn images with their shorthand iconography of stick figures, heads, cars, words and phrases, all executed in crude, vividly coloured brushstrokes.
From that point on his life changed irrevocably. The new Basquiat wore paint-spattered Versace and Armani suits with thousands of dollars in crumpled bills stuffed in the pockets. He fell in with a dealer called Annina Nosei who, bizarrely, installed him in the basement of her gallery where, in a haze of smoke from joints, with heaps of cocaine close by and jazz pounding on a ghetto blaster, he churned out paintings that she sold to visiting collectors.
His relationships with his dealers were problematic but then, as Hoban describes them, they are a strange breed. Nor did Basquiat display any great loyalty, so the turn-over was brisk, and the list reads like a directory of the 1980s wheeler-dealers: the notorious Larry "Go-Go" Gagosian, known for offering to prospective clients paintings that weren't his to sell, the compulsive Swiss collector Bruno Bischofberger whose monthly visits to New York were non-stop spending sprees, the driven, obsessive Mary Boone, who more or less invented Julian Schnabel, and the mysterious Iranian, Vrej Baghoomian.
Basquiat had problems with all personal relationships. He pursued women intently, but usually broke with them as soon as they succumbed, only to draw them back and go through the whole process again. There were exceptions. He and Madonna were an item but she walked out on him because of his drug problem. Suzanne Mallock and Jennifer Goode were - relatively - enduring loves who gave up in exasperation.
Basquiat was always looking for a surrogate father, and long before he met him he'd cast Andy Warhol in the role. He idolised the Pope of Pop, but Warhol was distinctly wary of the young painter. With Bischofberger's encouragement, though, they met and embarked on an uneasy friendship and an artistic collaboration. This should have been mutually beneficial but in the event Basquiat emerged bruised and resentful. By the time of Warhol's death, after a botched routine operation in 1987, they weren't on good terms. Still, friends said that Basquiat was plunged into a suicidal depression by the news.
His condition deteriorated. He was too thin, he lost a tooth, his face was pock-marked with sores. He'd always prided himself on his ability to absorb quantities of drugs that would kill any normal person, but his drug-taking was completely out of control. He was shooting speedballs, the heroin and cocaine cocktail that killed John Belushi.
By general consent his best work was done early in the decade. Unable to cope with the money and the fame, and under pressure to produce, he quickly began to parody himself and never had the chance to mature. "When you're an artist," one of his lovers said, "you just live until you burn." But Mary Boone was right: more than anything, Basquiat's short, tragic life exemplifies an era of hype and excess.
Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, by Phoebe Hoban, is published by Quartet Books (£12 in UK)