Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ miʃɛl baskja]; 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" redirects here. For other uses, see Basquiat (disambiguation).
Jean-Michel Basquiat
December 22, 1960
August 12, 1988 (aged 27)
Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York City
1978–1988
Painting, drawing
- Irony of Negro Policeman (1981)
- Untitled (Skull) (1981)
- Untitled (1982)
- Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump (1982)
- Defacement (1983)
- Hollywood Africans (1983)
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 music 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 was 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 outer experience. He appropriated poetry, drawing, and painting, and married text and image, abstraction, figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique. He used social commentary in his paintings as a tool for introspection and for identifying with his experiences in the black community, as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism.
Since his death at the age of 27 in 1988, Basquiat's work has steadily increased in value. In 2017, Untitled, a 1982 painting depicting a black skull with red and yellow rivulets, sold for a record-breaking $110.5 million, becoming one of the most expensive paintings ever purchased.[1]
Biography[edit]
Early life: 1960–1977[edit]
Basquiat was born on December 22, 1960, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York City, the second of four children to Matilde Basquiat (née Andrades, 1934–2008) and Gérard Basquiat (1930–2013).[2] He had an older brother, Max, who died shortly before his birth, and two younger sisters, Lisane (b. 1964) and Jeanine (b. 1967).[3][4] His father was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and his mother was born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents.[5] He was raised Catholic.[6]
Matilde instilled a love for art in her young son by taking him to local art museums and enrolling him as a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.[2][7] Basquiat was a precocious child who learned to read and write by the age of four.[8] His mother encouraged her son's artistic talent and he often tried to draw his favorite cartoons.[9] In 1967, he started attending Saint Ann's School, a private school.[10][11] There he met his friend Marc Prozzo and together they created a children's book, written by Basquiat at the age of seven and illustrated by Prozzo.[9][12]
In 1968, Basquiat was hit by a car while playing in the street at the age of seven.[13] His arm was broken and he suffered several internal injuries, which required a splenectomy.[14] While he was hospitalized, his mother brought him a copy of Gray's Anatomy to keep him occupied.[15] After his parents separated that year, Basquiat and his sisters were raised by their father.[2][15] His mother was admitted to a psychiatric hospital when he was ten and thereafter spent her life in and out of institutions.[16] By the age of eleven, Basquiat was fluent in French, Spanish and English, and an avid reader of all three languages.[17]
Basquiat's family resided in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Boerum Hill and then in 1974, moved to Miramar, Puerto Rico.[18][19] When they returned to Brooklyn in 1976, Basquiat attended Edward R. Murrow High School.[20] He struggled to deal with his mother's instability and rebelled as a teenager.[21] He ran away from home at 15 when his father caught him smoking cannabis in his room.[22][2][15] He slept on park benches at Washington Square Park and took LSD.[23][24] Eventually, his father spotted him with a shaved head and called the police to bring him home.[25]
In the 10th grade, he enrolled at City-As-School, an alternative high school in Manhattan, home to many artistic students who found conventional schooling difficult.[10] He would skip school with his friends, but still received encouragement from his teachers, and began to write and illustrate for the school newspaper.[26] He developed the character SAMO to endorse a faux religion.[27] The saying "SAMO" had started as a private joke between Basquiat and his schoolmate Al Diaz, as an abbreviation for the phrase "Same old shit."[26] They drew a series of cartoons for their school paper before and after using SAMO©.[28]
Exhibitions[edit]
Basquiat's first public exhibition was at The Times Square Show in New York in June 1980.[50] In May 1981, he had his first solo exhibition at Galleria d'Arte Emilio Mazzoli in Modena.[54] In late 1981, he joined the Annina Nosei Gallery in New York, where he had his first American one-man show from March 6 to April 1, 1982.[164] In 1982, he also had shows at the Gagosian Gallery in West Hollywood, Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in Zurich, and the Fun Gallery in the East Village.[165] Major exhibitions of his work have included Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings 1981–1984 at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh in 1984, which traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London; Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam in 1985. In 1985, the University Art Museum, Berkeley hosted Basquiat's first solo American museum exhibition.[166] His work was showcased at Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover in 1987 and 1989.[167]
The first retrospective of his work was held by the Baghoomian Gallery in New York from October to November 1989.[168] His first museum retrospective, Jean-Michel Basquiat, was at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York from October 1992 to February 1993.[169][170] The show was sponsored by AT&T, MTV and Basquiat's former girlfriend Madonna.[171] It subsequently traveled to the Menil Collection in Texas; the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa; and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in Alabama, from 1993 to 1994.[172] The exhibition's catalog was edited by Richard Marshall and included several essays from different perspectives.[173] In 1996, Madonna sponsored an exhibition of his work at the Serpentine Gallery in London.[174][175][176]
In March 2005, the retrospective Basquiat was mounted by the Brooklyn Museum in New York.[177] It traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.[178] From October 2006 to January 2007, the first Basquiat exhibition in Puerto Rico was held at the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, produced by ArtPremium, Corinne Timsit and Eric Bonici.[179] In 2016, the Brooklyn Museum organized and presented Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks, the first major viewing of Basquiat's sketches, poetry, notetaking, and overall artist's book practice. The show traveled to the Pérez Art Museum Miami later on. A monograph featuring essays by Pérez Art Museum Miami executive director, the art historian Franklin Sirmans and Henry Louis Gates, was published in the occasion of this exhibition[180][181]
Basquiat remains an important source of inspiration for a younger generation of contemporary artists all over the world, such as Rita Ackermann and Kader Attia—as shown, for example, at the exhibition Street and Studio: From Basquiat to Séripop co-curated by Cathérine Hug and Thomas Mießgang and previously exhibited at Kunsthalle Wien, Austria, in 2010.[182] Basquiat and the Bayou, a 2014 show presented by the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, focused on the artist's works with themes of the American South.[183] The Brooklyn Museum exhibited Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks in 2015.[184] In 2017, Basquiat Before Basquiat: East 12th Street, 1979–1980 exhibited as Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, which displayed works created during the year Basquiat lived with his friend Alexis Adler.[39] Later that year, the Barbican Centre in London exhibited Basquiat: Boom for Real.[185]
In 2019, the Brant Foundation in New York, hosted an extensive exhibition of Basquiat's works with free admission.[186] All 50,000 tickets were claimed before the exhibition opened, so additional tickets were released.[187] In June 2019, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York presented Basquiat's "Defacement": The Untold Story.[188] Later that year, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne opened the exhibition Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines.[189] In 2020, the Lotte Museum of Art mounted the first major exhibition of Jean-Michel Basquiat in Seoul.[190] The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston exhibited Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation from October 2020 to July 2021.[191]
Basquiat's family curated Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure, an immersive exhibition with over 200 never-before-seen and rarely shown works.[192] King Pleasure debuted at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Chelsea, New York in April 2022.[193] In March 2023, the exhibition traveled to the Grand LA in Los Angeles.[194]
In 2022, the Albertina presented the first museum retrospective of Basquiat's work in Austria.[195] The exhibition Seeing Loud: Basquiat and Music was mounted at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2022.[196] In 2023, the show traveled to Paris as Basquiat Soundtracks at the Philharmonie de Paris.[197] Later that year, the Brant Foundation held the exhibition Basquiat X Warhol at their East Village location.[198]
Sexuality[edit]
Basquiat had romantic relationships with many women, including singer Madonna.[258][259] Although he never publicly identified as bisexual, a few of his friends have stated that he had sexual relationships with men.[260][261] Basquiat's former girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk described his sexual interest as "not monochromatic. It did not rely on visual stimulation, such as a pretty girl. It was a very rich multichromatic sexuality. He was attracted to people for all different reasons. They could be boys, girls, thin, fat, pretty, ugly ... He was attracted to intelligence more than anything and to pain."[262]
Biographer Phoebe Hoban wrote on Basquiat's first sexual experiences, which were with men.[263] When Basquiat was a minor in Puerto Rico he was orally raped by a barber dressed in drag, then he got involved with a deejay.[20] Art critic Rene Ricard, who helped launch Basquiat's career, said that Basquiat was into everything and had "turned tricks" in Condado when he lived in Puerto Rico. As a teenager, Basquiat told a friend that he worked as a prostitute on 42nd Street in Manhattan when he ran away from home.[26] Andy Warhol said Basquiat had refused to go with him and Keith Haring to Rounds, a gay hustler bar,[264] because it brought back bad memories of when he was hustling.[265]