A grainy home video shows three young siblings joyously playing together on the grass in a busy New York park one summer, some time in the 1960s. In another, a mischievous-looking toddler, impossibly dapper in a cream cable-knit cardigan and beret, beams at the camera. Another captures the pride of two young parents pushing a pram carrying their newborn past the brownstones of Brooklyn. They are intimate, unremarkable scenes of family life; the sort that could belong to anyone. Except they don’t. The toddler is Jean-Michel Basquiat. The siblings are Basquiat and his sisters, Lisane and Jeanine. The parents are Gérard and Matilde Basquiat (née Andrades). What makes these images so arresting is not that we are seeing one of the most mythologised artists of the 20th century before he became world famous. It’s that we are seeing him within something that has been absent from much of that mythology: a family. A family that he belonged to; one that shaped him long before the art world knew who he was; a family that remained long after he was gone.
It is hard to pinpoint an artist whose influence – particularly considering the brevity of his life – has travelled so far beyond the traditional art space in the way Jean-Michel Basquiat’s has. His paintings have become some of the world’s most culturally explored and valued. In 2017, (1982) went under the hammer for a record-breaking $110 million at Sotheby’s in New York. In fashion, collaborations have included brands from Tiffany and Louis Vuitton to Supreme and Comme des Garçons – the latter for which he walked at its spring/summer 1987 show in Paris. In 1981, Debbie Harry famously bought , the first painting Basquiat sold, and that same year he appeared as a guest DJ in Blondie’s “Rapture” – the first music video with rap to appear on MTV. Jay-Z famously references Basquiat in his bars: “Most Kingz” (2010) took inspiration from Basquiat’s Charles the First. There have been films – (1996), directed by Julian Schnabel; Boom for Real (2017), directed by Sara Driver; Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (2010), directed by Tamra Davis. And then there are the books, the exhibitions, the odes.
But fame does strange things to biography. Over time, the life of a “celebrity” inevitably becomes riddled with inaccuracies, and even the facts are condensed to a handful of specifics that conveniently bypass nuance in order to read like an attention-grabbing elevator pitch. In the case of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the narrative, one that has been spun for so long, goes something like this: “Basquiat, a brilliant, young Haitian Puerto Rican homeless graffiti artist, who hustled on the streets of downtown New York and somehow infiltrated the rarefied and overwhelmingly white art world to become the artistic prodigy who befriended Andy Warhol, made an enormous amount of money, became a junkie and was found dead from a heroin overdose at age 27.” It is a spectacular, brutal story. It’s the story that has endured. But it is not really the story of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
This distinction between the myth and the man is at the heart of , the new documentary directed by Quinn Whitney Wilson and Viridiana Lieberman, which premiered to critical acclaim at the Tribeca Festival and will be released by Netflix in December. It is the first Basquiat documentary made with the approval and participation of his estate, but its real significance lies elsewhere. This is not another attempt to unpack the paintings or retrace the familiar trajectory of Basquiat’s career. Instead, the film turns its attention to the person: the brother, the son, the boy from Brooklyn. The prankster who told his sibling that if she ate watermelon seeds she would sweat watermelon juice, and thereafter be able to have watermelon juice whenever she wanted. The curious, clever young man who, at the age of seven, when hospitalised after being knocked over by a car, devoured Henry Gray’s a book that inspired the name of Basquiat’s band Gray, as well of so much of his work that is described as “anatomical”. The person whose life did not begin when the art world noticed him.
Two of the people best placed to remember that person are his younger sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, co-administrators of the Basquiat estate, who were 24 and 21 when their brother died in 1988. “ The film left me raw. And vulnerable,” says Lisane, speaking at her home in Carlsbad in California. “It is a walk through the most emotionally, mentally, spiritually and physically challenging times in our life.” More so, says Jeanine, because for much of the 38 years since his death, they have avoided the limelight. “We’ve always been a very private family. Even going to [his] exhibitions was very difficult. [After his death] Lisane and I spent a majority of our time quietly raising our families and having our own careers.” (Jeanine was an accountant and Lisane a former corporate executive, who owns Hera Hub, a co-working company to support female entrepreneurs. She is also founder of Shaping Freedom, a life and personal growth organisation.) But making this film felt necessary. “Once we were managing the estate [it had been managed by their father up until his death in 2013] and had to step in more publicly, we felt it was really important to fill in what had been missing from the narrative,” says Jeanine.
The choice of Wilson as director made sense to the sisters. “We were very impressed with the energy Quinn brought,” says Lisane. For everyone else, it was arguably a left-field decision for what was a highly coveted project. Best known for her work as Lizzo’s creative director, Wilson had made her name through shorts – which is how Lisane and Jeanine discovered her work. She’d never made a feature film. Nevertheless, the sisters loved her approach and wanted her on board.
The project, recalls Wilson, began with an email – which she thought was a prank. “It was December 2021. Someone was asking if they could connect me to the Basquiat estate… Given that I was then 27 years old and I grew up in the States knowing that this is one of the most prolific Black artists of all time, I was like, ‘That’s not real.’ Like, ‘This must be spam, because, what?’ But yeah, it was real,” she says with a laugh. “Lisane, Jeanine and I ended up having a Zoom on 22 December. Which is Jean-Michel’s birthday.”
At the time, the Basquiat sisters were preparing for , the exhibition they mounted in New York in 2022 and later took to LA. “It had been 34 years since their brother had passed,” recalls Wilson. “And this was the first time they were going through all the ephemera and the photos and the storytelling and remembering all of this stuff together as siblings. It was really emotional. So when I got off the phone, I was just like, ‘OK, I might be 27 and maybe I haven’t done this before, but it needs to happen. We need to make this into a film.’”
Wilson brought Lieberman on as co-director three years later. “I realised that it was a much bigger undertaking than expected. I needed to find the support of someone who could really handle the intensity of digging back into someone’s life.”
There are many details – archive footage, private family photographs, memories from friends and family – that will be seen and heard publicly for the first time. A young Basquiat, laughing as he runs around wearing an elegant taupe dressing gown in the family house, a book-filled brownstone in Brooklyn that his parents owned. Jean-Michel’s signed membership card to the Brooklyn Museum. A baby Basquiat being rocked by his father and gurgling on his parents’ bed. An adult Basquiat hanging out with his dad in Hawaii, where Basquiat played tennis in moccasins… Much of this will be surprising and, more importantly, enlightening, even to those who thought they knew Basquiat. Which of course was the point.
“I watched so many films about Jean-Michel, read so many books, and they all felt so outside-looking-in,” says Lieberman. “They felt so far away from him. And they were always pricing him and defining him and analysing him. Hearing his sisters tell their story, uncovering the archive, following the footage and letting it speak for itself felt like it protected the truth about who he really was.” Or, as Wilson puts it: “We wanted to show that, no, he didn’t just pop up in the middle of Washington Park out of a cardboard box. He had an upbringing, he came from somewhere.”
What the sisters didn’t expect was how significant a role the film would play in helping them work through their grief following Jean-Michel’s death. It is something, admits Jeanine, they had only begun to confront more recently. “You know,” she says quietly, “we lived this life with Jean-Michel as sisters, as children together. But you don’t really figure out how you’ve been affected by the things that happened until you reflect on it later.” By this point, the sadness in Jeanine’s voice is palpable. As Lisane starts to speak, she pauses, catching her breath as she reflects on their lives with and without Jean-Michel. “I found [the film] very healing,” she says simply. “And I didn’t expect that. It opened the door for Jeanine and I, and the family, to really look at our lives in a way that we hadn’t. The film gave us that walk-through, what happened in our family, to our childhood, the ways that our lives had been shifted by Jean-Michel’s death, and what it did to us as an ecosystem…”
Lisane trails off for a second, composing herself before speaking again. “Jeanine and I would refer to it as like the third leg of a three-legged stool. What that did to us as a family with three children. You know? And now there’s the two of us, and how we’ve navigated that.” But for many years her focus was on her parents’ grief, not hers.
One of Basquiat’s sketchbooks, circa 1977.
The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat“I always felt like my pain was second to theirs,” she continues. “They lost their child. So I didn’t prioritise the ways that I was impacted or how Jeanine and I as siblings were impacted by it. We put our parents’ grief before ours, because ultimately, they lost their son. And so the film, on the heels of the exhibition, really looks at how my mother, my father, Jeanine and I had been impacted by the loss of our brother. It is a different facet of his life that is worth knowing.”
Jean-Michel Basquiat grew up in a culturally engaged brownstone in Brooklyn with his sisters and Haitian father Gérard, a businessman and accountant, and his art-loving mother, Matilde, who was Brooklyn-born and of Puerto Rican descent. They split up when Basquiat was eight, which was devastating for the artist. (In the film, his cousin Reuben describes how inconsolable Basquiat was when he learnt his parents were getting a divorce: “I’m going to lose my family,” he wept.) The Basquiat family unit had been tight, and his mother was key to that. After the breakdown of her marriage, she suffered from mental-health issues that saw her drift in and out of psychiatric wards for the rest of her life before she died, aged 74, in 2008. Her daughters were keen, given her influence on Basquiat, and on their family, that she should be a central figure in the film.
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But the decision was also, explains Jeanine, a way to address the whispers. “We’ve been hearing things in the last five years, [like] ‘We don’t hear anything about Matilde. Why are they hiding her?’ But Lisane and I really didn’t like speaking about her because we were being protective of her mental health. And sometimes when you protect people, it’s sort of looked at differently. But it really was about her deserving to live a life privately. Just because her son is really famous, doesn’t mean that there should be a light that’s constantly shone on her. So the film was the medium [through which] we decided to speak more about her. About the contribution she made to Jean-Michel and how she impacted all three of us. That was really important for us.” Nevertheless, adds Lisane, it was tough. “ To talk publicly about our mother’s pain, our father’s struggles and just the emotional and mental landscape that came out of this horrific experience of having lost our brother and them losing their son… Those are hard things to talk about. Even the night of his passing…” she continues, her voice breaking. “Yeah… That was not easy to share.”
Still, Jean-Michel’s sisters are keen that their brother’s life should not be wrapped up in his death; the film highlights just how much more there was to him. “ Jean-Michel was just so much fun,” recalls Lisane, the memory lighting up her face. “He was an amazing brother. He was a great person to talk to, he was generous and he had an incredible heart.” Jeanine nods in agreement. “I hope people will see this film and see him from a different perspective. To see him as a brother, a son and someone who was just a great human being.”
Jean-Michel Basquiat is on Netflix from 11 December