Background and career
Jean-Michel Basquiat ( BAH-skee-AH(T), French: [ʒɑ̃ miʃɛl baskja]; December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an American artist. He 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 in Manhattan, particularly in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side where disco, 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 artists 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 drew inspiration from his Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage and explored dichotomies such as wealth versus poverty and integration versus segregation. He combined poetry, drawing, and painting, bringing together text and image, abstraction, figuration, and historical information. He also used social commentary as a tool for introspection, identifying with his experiences as a Black American, and to challenge power structures and systems of racism. Basquiat died at the age of 27 in 1988 of a heroin overdose. Since then, his 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.
Jean-Michel 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). He had an older brother, Max, who died shortly before Jean-Michel's birth, and two younger sisters, Lisane (b. 1964) and Jeanine (b. 1967). His father was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and his mother was born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents. He was raised Catholic. 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. Basquiat was a precocious child who learned to read and write by the age of four. His mother encouraged her son's artistic talent and he often tried to draw his favorite cartoons. In 1967, he started attending Saint Ann's School, a private school. 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. In 1968, at the age of seven, Basquiat was hit by a car while playing in the street. His arm was broken and he suffered several internal injuries, which required a splenectomy. While he was hospitalized, his mother brought him a copy of Gray's Anatomy to keep him occupied. After his parents separated that year, Basquiat and his sisters were raised by their father. His mother was admitted to a psychiatric hospital when he was ten and thereafter spent her life in and out of institutions. By the age of 11, Basquiat was fluent in French, Spanish and English, and an avid reader of all three languages. Basquiat's family resided in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Boerum Hill and then, in 1974, moved to Miramar, Puerto Rico. When they returned to Brooklyn in 1976, Basquiat attended Edward R. Murrow High School. He struggled to deal with his mother's instability and rebelled as a teenager. He ran away from home at 15 when his father caught him smoking cannabis in his room. He slept on park benches at Washington Square Park and took LSD. Eventually, his father spotted him with a shaved head and called the police to bring him home. 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. He would skip school with his friends, but still received encouragement from his teachers, and began to write and illustrate for the school newspaper. He developed the character SAMO to endorse a faux religion. 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."
In May 1978, Basquiat and Diaz began spray painting graffiti on buildings in Lower Manhattan. Working under the pseudonym SAMO, they inscribed poetic and satirical advertising slogans such as "SAMO© AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO GOD." In June 1978, Basquiat was expelled from City-As-School for pieing the principal. At 17, his father kicked him out of the house when he decided to drop out of school. He worked for the Unique Clothing Warehouse in NoHo while continuing to create graffiti at night. On December 11, 1978, The Village Voice published an article about the SAMO graffiti. In 1979, Basquiat appeared on the live public-access television show TV Party hosted by Glenn O'Brien. Basquiat and O'Brien formed a friendship and he made regular appearances on the show over the next few years. Eventually, he began spending time writing graffiti around the School of Visual Arts, where he befriended students John Sex, Kenny Scharf, and Keith Haring. In April 1979, Basquiat met Michael Holman at the Canal Zone Party and they founded the noise rock band Test Pattern, which was later renamed Gray. Other members of Gray included Shannon Dawson, Nick Taylor, Wayne Clifford and Vincent Gallo. They performed at nightclubs such as Max's Kansas City, CBGB, Hurrah and the Mudd Club. During this period, Basquiat lived in the East Village with his friend Alexis Adler, a Barnard biology graduate. He often copied diagrams of chemical compounds borrowed from Adler's science textbooks. She documented Basquiat's creative explorations as he transformed the floors, walls, doors and furniture into his artworks. He also made postcards with his friends Jennifer Stein and John Sex.
In October 1979, at Arleen Schloss's open space called A's, Basquiat showed his SAMO montages using color Xerox copies of his works. Schloss allowed Basquiat to use the space to create his "MAN MADE" clothing, which were painted upcycled garments. In November 1979, costume designer Patricia Field carried his clothing line in her upscale boutique on 8th Street in Greenwich Village. Field also displayed his readymade sculptures in the store window. Around this time, Basquiat encountered Pop artist Andy Warhol with art critic Henry Geldzahler at W.P.A. restaurant in SoHo. He sold Warhol a postcard titled Stupid Games, Bad Ideas. Seeking to establish a connection to Warhol, Basquiat later told Art in America, "I was also selling handmade postcards, and handpainted Abstract Expressionist sweatshirts, to make money. I even went to Interview magazine and bugged Andy Warhol, you know, to find out how to get closer to it." When Basquiat and Diaz had a falling out, he inscribed "SAMO IS DEAD" on the walls of SoHo buildings in 1980. In June 1980, Basquiat appeared in High Times magazine, his first national publication, as part of an article titled "Graffiti '80: The State of the Outlaw Art" by Glenn O'Brien. Later that year, he began filming O'Brien's independent film Downtown 81 (2000), originally titled New York Beat, which featured two Gray recordings on its soundtrack.
In June 1980, Basquiat participated in The Times Square Show, a multi-artist exhibition sponsored by Collaborative Projects Incorporated (Colab) and Fashion Moda. He was noticed by various critics and curators, including Jeffrey Deitch, who mentioned him in an article titled "Report from Times Square" in the September 1980 issue of Art in America. In February 1981, Basquiat participated in the New York/New Wave exhibition, curated by Diego Cortez at New York's P.S.1. Italian artist Sandro Chia recommended Basquiat's work to Italian dealer Emilio Mazzoli, who promptly bought 10 paintings for Basquiat to have a show at his gallery in Modena, Italy, in May 1981. In December 1981, art critic Rene Ricard published "The Radiant Child" in Artforum magazine, the first extensive article on Basquiat. During this period, Basquiat painted many pieces on objects he found in the streets, such as discarded doors. Basquiat sold his first painting, Cadillac Moon (1981), to Debbie Harry, lead singer of the punk rock band Blondie, for $200 after they had filmed Downtown 81 together. However Debbie in her autobiography on page 174 states the painting was "Self-Portrait with Suzanne. He also appeared as a disc jockey in the 1981 Blondie music video "Rapture", a role originally intended for Grandmaster Flash. At the time, Basquiat was living with his girlfriend, Suzanne Mallouk, who financially supported him as a waitress. In September 1981, art dealer Annina Nosei invited Basquiat to join her gallery at the suggestion of Sandro Chia. Soon after, he participated in her group show Public Address. She provided him with materials and a space to work in the basement of her gallery. In 1982, Nosei arranged for him to move into a loft, which also served as a studio at 101 Crosby Street in SoHo. He had his first American one-man show at the Annina Nosei Gallery in March 1982. He also painted in Modena for his second Italian exhibition in March 1982. That show was canceled, with Basquiat saying he felt exploited because he was expected to make eight paintings in one week.
By the summer of 1982, Basquiat had left the Annina Nosei Gallery, and gallerist Bruno Bischofberger became his worldwide art dealer. In June 1982, at 21, Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever take part in Documenta in Kassel, Germany. His works were exhibited alongside Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly, and Warhol. Bischofberger gave Basquiat a one-man show at his Zurich gallery in September 1982, and arranged for him to meet Warhol for lunch on October 4, 1982. Warhol recorded in his diary, "I took a Polaroid and he went home and within two hours a painting was back, still wet, of him and me together." The painting, Dos Cabezas (1982), ignited a friendship between them. Basquiat was photographed by James Van Der Zee for an interview with Henry Geldzahler published in the January 1983 issue of Warhol's Interview magazine. In November 1982, Basquiat's solo exhibition opened at the Fun Gallery in the East Village. Among the works exhibited were A Panel of Experts (1982) and Equals Pi (1982). In early December 1982, Basquiat began working at the Market Street studio space that art dealer Larry Gagosian had built below his Venice Beach, California home. In Los Angeles, Basquiat frequented the Whisky a Go Go and Tail o' the Pup with his friend artist George Condo. There, Basquiat commenced a series of paintings for a March 1983 show, his second at the Gagosian Gallery in West Hollywood. He was accompanied by his girlfriend, then-unknown singer Madonna. Gagosian later recalled: "Everything was going along fine. Jean-Michel was making paintings, I was selling them, and we were having a lot of fun. But then one day Jean-Michel said, 'My girlfriend is coming to stay with me.' … So I said, 'Well, what's she like?' And he said, 'Her name is Madonna and she's going to be huge.' I'll never forget that he said that."
