After the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat died from an overdose at the age of twenty-seven, hangers-on and chancers stepped over his still-warm body to help themselves to the artworks in his New York loft. It fell to the grieving Gerard Basquiat, with whom the painter had enjoyed one of the most turbulent father–son relationships in art history, to perform a last service on behalf of his child and phone for a locksmith.

Basquiat became the zombie of the art market. His shade is doomed to wander salerooms, salons and the humidified lock-ups of international freeports. This posthumous career, which saw him achieve a record price of $110.5 million almost thirty years after his death, has been sustained by tawdry dealings in back rooms. 

Many obituarists rushed to acclaim Basquiat as an important black voice, the Charlie Parker of the canvas, a link between graffiti and the revered doodles of Cy Twombly. For sceptics like Robert Hughes, however, he was at best a promising newcomer ‘caught in the buzz saw of artworld promotion, absurdly overrated by dealers, collectors, and, no doubt to their future embarrassment, by critics’.

Basquiat was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1960, to Gerard, a Haitian immigrant, and Matilde, who was of Puerto Rican descent. He was fluent in three languages and highly intelligent. When he was seven years old, his parents separated, after which he lived with the canny, hard-to-please Gerard and