Jean-Michel Basquiat
Painter of graffiti and words.
Jean-Michel Basquiat went from graffiti under the name SAMO to stardom in the New York art world. He died aged 27.
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in 1960 in Brooklyn, New York. His father came from Haiti and his mother had Puerto Rican roots. His mother took him to the city’s museums from an early age. When he was seven he was hit by a car and spent a long time in hospital. There he was given an anatomy book, Gray's Anatomy, and the bones and organs of the body later became a recurring motif in his pictures.
In the late 1970s, together with his friend Al Diaz, he wrote cryptic phrases on walls in Manhattan under the tag SAMO. The texts were poetic and critical rather than ordinary graffiti, and they attracted attention. He also played in the band Gray. In 1980 and 1981 he took part in group exhibitions that made his name, and in 1982 he was included in documenta in Kassel as one of the youngest artists ever.
His painting is full of words, symbols, crowns, skulls, arrows and half-crossed-out texts. He mixed acrylic, oilstick and spray paint on canvas, doors and planks. His subjects include Black heroes such as jazz musicians and boxers, racism, police violence, money and history. Among his well-known works is Hollywood Africans of 1983 in the Whitney Museum in New York. A painting of a skull from 1982 sold in 2017 for over 110 million dollars.
In 1983–1985 he worked closely with Andy Warhol, and they painted together on the same canvases. The collaboration received mixed reviews. Basquiat became a star in a white art world, and he himself described how he was both celebrated and treated as an exotic curiosity. He earned a great deal of money but led a life dominated by drugs.
Basquiat died of a heroin overdose in August 1988, aged 27. He left behind around a thousand paintings and even more drawings. Today he is regarded as one of the most important artists of the 1980s and as a role model for many Black artists, and his pictures are among the most expensive on the art market.