If his mother, Puerto Rican, took the young Jean-Michel to museums, his Haitian father – an accountant and happy sapper, made him hear his first jazz records, and perhaps bequeathed to him the invisible traces of voodoo that permeate the culture, mentalities and music from all over the Black Atlantic. But the kid Basquiat is first and foremost a New Yorker, steeped in a liberal cosmopolitanism whose motto, In god we trust, strikes as a command (to pay) American banknotes. He is therefore first and foremost the fruit of his time and…
