The piece is a page torn from the demonstration catalog available to visitors at the end of the Basquiat exhibition held at the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris from October 15, 2010 to January 30, 2011.
We need to distinguish two things here:
On the one hand, there's a portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat photographed by Nicholas Taylor in New York in 1979. The painter was 19 at the time, wearing a short Iroquois and may be the one holding a Fairgate ruler across the frame. Basquiat has always been very conscious of his image; you could say he's a poser. This image is no exception, and it would be interesting to analyze the various elements it combines.

First, there's Basquiat, a young Afro-American whose grandfather was of Haitian origin. The painter made much of his African roots (his paintings are full of fetishes) without ever having been to Africa. Basquiat is an educated man, a pure product of the American middle class, yet in most of his portraits, he poses like a savage. In the poster for the Musée d'Art Moderne exhibition, he is seated in a red armchair, dressed in a suit jacket and pants, but barefoot, with one foot resting on another upturned armchair. Here, it's the haircut that reinforces the image of the savage. The Iroquois refers to the Amerindian tribe of the same name, but also to the anarchist punk music that emerged in England at the turn of the 1970s.

The other important element of the image is the Fairgate ruler held across the picture. By this time, the young Basquiat already had a successful tagging career behind him. With his friend Al Diaz, he expressed himself in the form of aphorisms on the walls of Lower Manhattan, signing his name SAMO©. Yet it's with a tool that has nothing to do with the street that he poses in this image: a ruler, an object that harks back to the artist's studio. To pose with a ruler is, in a way, to think of oneself as a reference, which underlines the ambition of this young man. Or perhaps it's a reference to the history of segregation, when the aim was to demonstrate “scientifically”, by means of measurements, that black people were a different race. Here again, the spectre of the savage.

Then there's the support for this portrait: a page smuggled out of the catalog for the Basquiat exhibition, which runs until next Sunday at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The exhibition is already considered a success, judging by the number of visitors who have flocked to see the artist's canvases. It consecrates Basquiat as one of the major painters of the second half of the 20th century. Conceived as a blockbuster, it was accompanied by all the commercial apparatus befitting this type of event. The catalog from which the image is taken is placed on a desk as you leave the exhibition (it's the catalog on the left - you can still go and check the absence of this page on site). This is a “sacrificed” copy, so that the public can consult its contents and possibly buy another copy from the museum bookshop. It is generally discarded at the end of the exhibition.

In a way, this catalog is a poignant record of the event's success: countless hands have handled it, wearing away the paper on the edge of the book.