At Princeton, Basquiat's Paintings Are Shown Beside the Copier and the Screen

The Princeton University Art Museum is showing Jean-Michel Basquiat through the processes of the print shop. The galleries hang his photocopies and screenprints alongside pieces by the artists who shaped him, and the paintings are placed in that company too. The show argues that the habits of the press, such as repeating an image, layering it and carrying it from one surface to another, guided how he worked on canvas. For a collecting reader, that is a useful way to look. Work on paper and work made in multiples is often treated as a side room to the main event. Here it sits at the center of the argument. Visitors can trace a motif from a copied sheet or a pulled screen to a painted surface and judge for themselves how closely the two are related. Hanging the influences in the same rooms gives the exhibition a real lineage, so you see what he looked at as well as what he made. The museum is a short trip from New York. It is worth making for anyone who has ever wondered whether a painter's prints were a lesser category, because the show makes a careful, visible case that they were the foundation.

With reporting from ARTnews.