Jean-michel basquiat death
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The short but influential life of Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat remains one of the most important and influential artists of the modern and contemporary art period. Even now, years after his death, his popularity remains unshaken. In 2017, Basquiat beat Andy Warhol to be the most expensive American artist, after a $110 million sale of his artwork, Untitled (1982) at a Sotheby’s auction.
Who is he?
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in the 1960s New York, to Haitian and Puerto Rican parents. His mother suffered from a mental illness, while his father believed in corporal punishment, establishing a difficult childhood which would later influence his art.
Basquiat first established his name through his graffiti collaboration with friend, Al Diaz, called SAMO (‘Same Old Shit’). However, Basquiat became involved with drugs and, at the age of 17, ultimately left school and moved to the streets. At this point, he became highly involved in the party scene and regularly attended punk-art spaces, like the Mudd Club, where he DJ’d.
But Basquiat was nothing like the juvenile
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Jean‐Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn to Haitian and Puerto Rican parents in 1960, and left home as a teenager to live in Lower Manhattan, playing in a noise band, painting, and supporting himself with odd jobs. In the late 1970s, he and Al Diaz became known for their graffiti, a series of cryptic statements, such as “Playing Art with Daddy’s Money” and “9 to 5 Clone,” tagged SAMO. In 1980, after a group of artists from the punk and graffiti underground held the “Times Square Show,” Basquiat’s paintings began to attract attention from the art world.
In the 1981 article “The Radiant Child,” which helped catapult Basquiat to fame, critic Rene Ricard wrote, “We are no longer collecting art we are buying individuals. This is no piece by Samo. This is a piece of Samo.” This statement captures the market-driven ethos of the 1980s art boom that coincided with polarizing views played out in government and media, known as the culture wars. In this context, Basquiat was keenly aware of the racism frequently embedded in his reception, whether it took the
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Jean-Michel Basquiat
American artist (1960–1988)
"Basquiat" redirects here. For other uses, see Basquiat (disambiguation).
Jean-Michel Basquiat (French pronunciation:[ʒɑ̃miʃɛlbaskja]; December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement.
Basquiat first achieved notoriety in the late 1970s as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, alongside Al Diaz, writing enigmatic epigrams all over Manhattan, particularly in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop culture. By the early 1980s, his paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. At 21, Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever take part in Documenta in Kassel, Germany. At 22, he became one of the youngest to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial in New York. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his artwork in 1992.
Basquiat's art focused on dichotomies such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus
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