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Matilde Andrades regularly took the subway to Museum Mile with her son Jean-Michel Basquiat Their favourite destinations were MoMA and the Met Nearer to home was the Brooklyn Museum, where Matilde enlisted Jean-Michel as a junior member when he was only six years old   At MoMA, between 1958 and 1981, Monet’s Water Lilies and Picasso’s Guernica were on display As an adult, Basquiat recalled the impression made on him by these paintings Not only was he absorbed by the works, the works were absorbed into him Born in Brooklyn to a Haitian father and a mother from a Puerto-Rican family, his sense of belonging, yet not belonging, made him all the more affected by what he saw Like him, the paintings had a rich ancestral history that was eclipsed by their Anglophone setting Matilde nurtured this receptivity Between mother and son, museum visits developed into a folk tradition, a sacred rite of the in-between   It was not just Water Lilies and Guernica that were folded into Basquiat’s identity, but other works too Later in life, a girlfriend would describe being awed by the way that at MoMA, he knew ‘every painting, every room’ Among curators, such formative experiences do not tend to be accounted for There is an assumption that the rule-bound space of the gallery is not ‘child-friendly’ Equally prevalent is the Romantic idea of the child as the ultimate aesthetic subject; it was Baudelaire who insisted that ‘the child sees everything in a state of newness’ Basquiat’s story urges us to think beyond the poles of exclusion and simple enchantment, showing how art can become part of us   When I visit ‘Jean Michel Basquiat: Boom for Real at the Barbican’, I reflect on when, age five, I saw a Basquiat retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art Preserved in my memory are scars of colour (what I now know to be mostly oil stick), skeletal hatchings and hatchings of skeletons: an unrelenting bittiness More than the work, I remember the feelings the exhibition stirred Because the artist was clearly of the present yet already dead, I was haunted, and each