Jean-Michel Basquiat
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Jean-Michel Basquiat (December
22, 1960, Brooklyn - August 12, 1988, New York, New York) was an
American artist. He gained popularity, first as a graffiti artist in
New York City, and then as a successful 1980s-era Neo-expressionist
artist. Basquiat's paintings continue to influence modern day artists
and command high prices.
Basquiat's mother, Matilde, was Puerto Rican and his father, Gerard
Jean-Baptiste, is of Haitian origin and a former Haitian Minister of
the Interior. Because of his parents' nationalities, Basquiat was
fluent in French, Spanish, and English and often read Symbolist
poetry, mythology, history and medical texts, particularly Gray's
Anatomy in those languages. 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. 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 messages such as "Plush safe he think; SAMO" and "SAMO
is an escape clause". In December 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 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, and working
in the Unique Clothing Warehouse on Broadway. 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'Brien's live public-access cable show, TV Party . In the late
1970s, Basquiat formed a band called Gray, with the then-unknown
musician and actor Vincent Gallo. Gray played at clubs such as Max's
Kansas City, CBGB, Hurrahs, and the Mudd Club. Basquiat worked with
Gallo again in a film Downtown 81 (a.k.a New York Beat Movie) which
featured some of Gray's rare recordings on its soundtrack. He also
appeared in Blondie's video "Rapture" as a replacement for DJ
Grandmaster Flash when he was a no-show.
Basquiat first started to gain recognition as an artist in June 1980,
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 such gallery owners and patrons as Annina
Nosei, Vrej Baghoomian, 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 and then-unknown performer named Madonna in the fall of 1982.
In 1982, Basquiat met Andy Warhol, with whom he collaborated
extensively, eventually forging a close, if strained, friendship. He
was also briefly involved with artist David Bowes.
By 1984, many of Basquiat's friends were concerned about his excessive
drug use and increasingly erratic behavior, 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. On February 10, 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.
Basquiat died of mixed-drug toxicity (he had been combining cocaine
and heroin, known as "speedballing") in his Great Jones Street
loft/studio in 1988 several days before what would have been
Basquiat's second trip to the Cote d'Ivoire. After his death, a film
biography entitled Basquiat was made, directed by Julian Schnabel,
with actor Jeffrey Wright playing Basquiat.
