Jean-Michel Basquiat
(1960-1988)
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in New York City in 1960, where he died in 1988. Basquiat left his family home in Brooklyn at the age of fifteen and took to the streets. He had no formal training as an artist. A voracious autodidact, Basquiat quickly established himself as a street poet and artist, scrawling aphorisms across downtown Manhattan, copyrighting them under the name SAMO.
In 1981, he abandoned this alter ego and began painting, first on salvaged materials then later on canvas, and making bricolage with materials scavenged from the urban environment. From the outset he worked compulsively. He sold his first painting in 1981, and by 1982, spurred by the Neo-Expressionist art boom, his work was in great demand.
Basquiat fused drawing and painting with history and poetry to produce an artistic language and content that was entirely his own. Combining the tools of graffiti (Magic Marker, spray enamel) with those of fine art (oil and acrylic paint, collage, and oil stick), his best paintings maintain a powerful tension between opposing aesthetic forces—expression and knowledge, control and spontaneity, savagery and wit, urbanity and primitivism—while providing acerbic commentary on the harsher realities of race, culture, and society. In vividly colored canvases, forceful, schematic figures and menacing, masklike faces are inscribed against fields jostling with images, signs, symbols, and words used like brushstrokes. The frenetic, allover quality of many of the large works suggests a drive towards a sort of disjunctive mapping rather than the building of a classically unified composition.
Major exhibitions include The Modena Paintings, Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2023); King Pleasure, New York and Los Angeles (2022); Jean-Michel Basquiat, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris and the Brant Foundation, New York (2018); Boom for Real, Barbican Art Gallery, London and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2017); and Basquiat, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn (2005). His work can be found in the permanent collections of institutions such as the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Broad, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, among others.