jean-michel basquiat

Life

His mother, Matilde, was Puerto Rican and his father, Gerard, was of Haïtian origin. At an early age, Basquiat displayed an aptitude for art and was encouraged by his mother to draw, paint, and to participate in other art-related activities. Around the age of seven Basquiat was hospitalized for injuries related to a car accident. When in the hospital Basquiat's mother gave him the book "Gray's Anatomy" as a gift to pass the time. Basquiat loved the diagrams in the book and later began to inspire him in his artwork and also helped create the band "Gray".

In 1977, when he was 17, Basquiat and his friend Al Diaz started spray-painting graffiti art on slum buildings in lower Manhattan, adding the infamous signature of "SAMO" or "SAMO Shit" (i.e. "same ol' shit"). The graphics were pithy text messages such as "Plush safe he think; SAMO” and ""SAMO is an escape clause." In December of 1978, the Village Voice published an article about the writings. The SAMO project ended with the epitaph SAMO IS DEAD written on the walls of SoHo buildings.

In 1978, Basquiat dropped out of Edward R. Murrow High School and left home, a year before graduating. He moved into the city and lived with friends, surviving by selling T-shirts and postcards on the street. By 1979, however, Basquiat gained a certain celebrity status amidst the thriving art scene of Manhattan's East Village, for his regular appearances on Glenn O'Brian's live public-access cable show, TV Party.

In June 1980, he first started to gain recognition when he participated in The Times Square Show, a multi-artist exhibition, sponsored by Collaborative Projects Incorporated (Colab).

In 1981, poet, art critic and cultural provocateur Rene Ricard published "The Radiant Child" in Artforum magazine, helping to launch Basquiat's career to an international stage.

During the next few years, he continued exhibiting his works around New York alongside artists such as Keith Haring, Barbara Kruger, as well as internationally, promoted by his gallarists Annina Nosei, Larry Gagosian, Mary Boone and Bruno Bischofberger. By 1982, Basquiat was showing regularly alongside Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi, thus becoming part of a loose-knit group that art-writers, curators, and collectors would soon be calling the Neo-expressionist movement. He started dating an aspiring performer named Madonna in the fall of '82. In 1983, Basquiat met Andy Warhol, with whom he collaborated extensively, eventually forging a close, if strained, friendship.

By 1984, many of Basquiat's friends were concerned about his excessive drug use and increasingly erratic behaviour, including signs of paranoia. Basquiat had developed a frequent heroin habit by this point, starting from his early years living among the junkies and street artists in New York's underground.

In 1985 Basquiat appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in a feature entitled "New Art, New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist".

As Basquiat's international success heightened, his works were shown in solo exhibitions across major European capitals.

Tragically, Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose in his Great Jones Street loft/studio in 1988 several days before what would have been Basquiat's second trip to the Côte d'Ivoire.

Art periods

Basquiat's art career is known for his three broad, though overlapping styles. In the earliest period, from 1980 to late 1982, Basquiat used painterly gestures on canvas, often depicting skeletal figures and mask-like faces that expressed his obsession with mortality. Other frequently depicted imagery such as automobiles, buildings, police, children's sidewalk games, and graffiti came from his experience painting on the city streets. A middle period from late 1982 to 1985 featured multipanel paintings and individual canvases with exposed stretcher bars, the surface dense with writing, collage and seemingly unrelated imagery. These works reveal a strong interest in Basquiat's black and Haitian identity and his identification with historical and contemporary black figures and events. On one occasion Basquiat painted his girlfriend's dress, with his words, a "Little Shit Brown". The final period, from about 1986 to Basquiat's death in 1988, displays a new type of figurative depiction, in a new style with different symbols and content from new sources. This period seems to have also had a profound impact on the styles of artists who admired Basquiat's work. Basquiat's lasting creative influence is immediately recognizable in the work of subsequent and self-taught generational artists such as Mark Gonzales, Kelly D. Williams, Raymond Morris, and Francesco Clemente. Carlitos Alvarez Villanueva was amongst those that inspired Basquiat during this time, which retrospectively, was the final stage for the influential artist.

Andy Warhol

In 1983, Basquiat befriended pop artist Andy Warhol and the two made a number of collaborative works. They also painted together, influencing each others' work. Some speculated that Andy Warhol was merely using Basquiat for some of his techniques and insight. Their relationship continued until Warhol's death in 1987. Warhol's death was very distressing for Basquiat, and is speculated by Phoebe Hoban, in Basquiat, her 1998 biography on the artist, that Warhol's death was a turning point for Basquiat, and that afterwards his drug addiction and depression began to spiral.

Movies and television

Basquiat's character has been represented in motion pictures. He has been portrayed by Jeffrey Wright in Basquiat, a bio-pic about the artist directed by Julian Schnabel. He played himself in Downtown 81 (a.k.a New York Beat Movie), and in Blondie's video for "Rapture". Jean-Michel was also a frequent guest on "Glenn O'Brien's TV Party", a groundbreaking NYC public access television show.

Quotes

• "Every single line means something."

• "Since I was seventeen I thought I might be a star. I'd think about all my heroes, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix... I had a romantic feeling about how these people became famous."

• "I don't think about art when I'm working. I try to think about life."

• "I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is."