As Basquiat’s fame rises so do his insecurities, and his feelings toward Mallouk begin to run hot and cold. Their love affair is tumultuous, surrounded by all the excess New York has to offer.
After a troubled and violent past, Mallouk flees her home for New York and is soon charmed by the burgeoning street artist. Instead of mapping a sequential timeline, Clement presents the lovers’ history using poetic prose and augments it with Mallouk’s anecdotes. By unraveling Basquiat’s romance with Suzanne Mallouk, the woman he affectionately referred to as “Venus,” Jennifer Clement’s Widow Basquiat: A Love Story presents an indictment of the many narrow caricatures that exist of the artist. But those stories were always too meager, often willfully omitting Basquiat’s insecurity, his violent and arrogant temperament and the complexities of race, sexuality and AIDS during the grab-all culture of the 1980s. They wanted to create the legacy of Basquiat in the image of the “Radiant Child,” as critic Rene Ricard famously dubbed him. Basquiat combined crude images with text that commented on culture, race, history and often death.įollowing Basquiat’s death in 1988 at the age of 27 from a heroin overdose, many critics, filmmakers, biographers and even other artists tried to own the narrative. Known as SAMO, a pioneering graffiti writer in Lower East Side Manhattan in the early 1980s, his success unfolded as an unlikely rags-to-riches story while he moved from scripting idiosyncratic messages on city streets to bold and confrontational paintings in high-end galleries. Jean-Michel Basquiat died while the influence of his work had yet to be established.
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