Basquiat, Jean-Michel

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Basquiat, Jean-Michel

December 22, 1960
August 12, 1988

Jean-Michel Basquiat was one of the most prominent artists to gain worldwide recognition in the 1980s. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, of Haitian and Puerto Rican–American parentage. His parents were separated in 1968, and Basquiat and his two sisters grew up with their father in Brooklyn, except for a period from 1974 to 1976, when the family lived in Puerto Rico. At the age of seven, Basquiat was hit by a car and badly hurt. He spent a month in the hospital, where his spleen was removed. While he was recuperating, his mother gave him Gray's Anatomy, a reference work that led to a lifelong interest in images of human anatomy.

Basquiat dropped out of high school and left home at the age of seventeen, determined to become a star in the downtown art and club scene of the late 1970s, where his aphoristic graffiti writings and drawings signed "SAMO-(c)" soon earned wide underground recognition. In 1980 his art was exhibited, for the first time and to critical acclaim, in the Times Square Show in New York City. Other group shows followed, and in 1981 he had his first solo exhibition in Modena, Italy.

In New York, Basquiat began showing at the Annina Nosei Gallery in SoHo, using the gallery basement as his studio. His first one-person show at Annina Nosei took place in 1982, and soon his work was being exhibited at prominent galleries worldwide. In 1982, Basquiat was the youngest artist to participate in Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany, and one of the youngest ever to be included the following year in the Whitney Biennial. A close friendship with Andy Warhol was a significant force in his life until Warhol's death in 1987.

Within the space of a few years, Basquiat rose from an anonymous street graffitist to become a world-famous artist, a feat that—as much as his art itself—came to define his popular image and epitomize the fast-paced art world of the 1980s. As a young black male, however, he was viewed with suspicion by people blind to the significance of his work. In addition, a growing drug problem exacerbated his difficult relations with art dealers, family, and the people closest to him. Basquiat died of a heroine overdose in August 1988 at the age of twenty-seven.

Since his death, the importance of Basquiat's work has come to be still more widely recognized. In only eight years his work evolved from a direct, highly energized, expressionistic vocabulary to a complex synthesis of African-American and European cultural traditions, incorporating elements of black history, music, and popular culture in an advanced visual language of painting, collage, photomechanical reproduction, and sculpture. In his hands, a sometimes raucous world of boxing, jazz, TV, and political reality was expressed in the language of Pablo Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet, and Leonardo da Vinci. His syncopated and haunting juxtaposition of words and images created a kind of visual poetry that is one of his most distinctive contributions to twentieth-century painting.

The first full museum retrospective of Basquiat's work, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, opened in New York City in 1992. In 1998 (a year after the release of Julian Schnabel's Basquiat, a respectful film biography) one of his paintings was sold for a price in excess of three million dollars.

See also Art in the United States, Contemporary; Painting and Sculpture, Photography, U.S.