Remembered not only for his exciting and evocative artworks, Jean-Michel Basquiat was a fresh force of creativity and confidence on the 80’s New York art scene and has cemented his legacy as one of the greatest modern artists. His work, renowned for its unconventional rebellion, brought graffiti-style art to the mainstream.
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born on December 22nd, 1960 in Brooklyn, New York City to parents Matilde and Gérard Basquiat. Basquiat was of Puerto Rican and Haitian descent and was raised in the Catholic faith. It was clear to all that he was an incredibly intelligent child; he could read and write by the age of four, and by eleven, he was fluent in Spanish and French, as well as English, and would often read and write interchangeably between the three. From an early age his mother Matilde encouraged a love of art by taking him and his sisters to various museums, even going so far as to enlist him as a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and by seven was enrolled in an arts-orientated private school.[1]
Despite his academic prowess and private education, Basquiat did not have the easiest childhood: when he was seven, he was hit by a car when playing in the street and spent several months bed-bound as a result. During this time his parents separated, and following an episode of poor mental health, his mother was committed to a psychiatric institution. She spent the rest of her life in and out of institutions, whilst Basquiat and his sisters lived with their father. Basquiat struggled to cope with his mother’s turbulent mental health and as a teenager, he began to rebel. At fifteen, he ran away from home after his father caught him smoking marijuana. He was briefly homeless, sleeping on park benches, and experimenting with more extreme drugs such as acid, before eventually returning to his father.
When he was sixteen, Basquiat was enrolled in City-As-School, an unconventional high school aimed at helping young creatives who struggled with mainstream education. There, he met fellow artist Al Diaz. Together, they created SAMO (meaning "Same Old Shit"), a satirical faux advertising brand aimed at provoking mainstream society. They would graffiti downtown Manhattan with phrases such as "SAMO AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO GOD", and briefly formed a noise rock band called Gray. It was around this time that director Glenn O’Brien discovered Basquiat, and asked him to star in Downtown 81 (2000), a film documenting post-punk Manhattan and the art movement there. The soundtrack featured songs by Gray. The film itself wasn’t finished until 2000, almost twenty years after it was filmed.
Basquiat was enamored with the idea of fame, and became increasingly concerned with his own:
Since I was seventeen I thought I might be a star. I'd think about all my heroes, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix... I had a romantic feeling about how these people became famous.[2]
Basquiat sold his first painting to lead singer of Blondie, Debbie Harry, for $200 after they had worked together filming Downtown 81 in 1981. Not long after, he was offered his own exhibition space at Annina Nosei Gallery, in March 1982. From here, Basquiat’s star continued to rise, hosting numerous solo shows in the Gagosian Gallery in West Hollywood, as well as the Fun Gallery in the East Village, New York.
In 1982, Basquiat formed a fast and intense friendship with artist Andy Warhol. In his diaries, Warhol wrote that within a few hours of their first formal meeting, Basquiat "went home and within two hours a painting was back, still wet, of him and me together". This painting, titled Dos Cabezas, was the beginning of a partnership that would shape both their careers. The pair frequently collaborated together, would get pedicures together, and would frequently spend days in a row alone together in one another’s studios. Despite their difference in age and fame — Warhol was an established artist in his fifties, Basquiat a young up-and-comer in his twenties — they worked seamlessly together for a number of years.[3]
Basquiat painted predominantly in a Graffiti-style, using bold colors and strokes to make clear his thoughts and opinions. He smeared words across his canvases, weaving poetry and paint to evoke the viewer’s emotions. His work often dealt with themes of race, colonialism and class struggle. Though he was often reluctant to explain or analyze his work, Basquiat once commented that "the Black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings. I realized that I didn't see many paintings with Black people in them. But I am not a Black artist. I am an artist."
Though he only ever made public his sexual relationships with women, several of Basquiat’s close friends have claimed he had ones with men, too. In an interview with Vulture, his former girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk said his sexuality;
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. He was very attracted to people who silently bore some sort of inner pain as he did, and he loved people who were one of a kind, people who had a unique vision of things.[4]
Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose in his home in Manhattan, New York City, on August 12th, 1988. He was only twenty-seven years old. For the whole of his life, he had struggled with sobriety, more-so in his last eighteen months. Though his family and friends are unsure whether his overdose was intentional or accidental, it is thought that his increasingly reckless substance abuse was a way of coping with the death of his close friend Andy Warhol in February of 1987. He had a private funeral for close friends and family on 17th August, followed by a public memorial held at Saint Peter’s Church, on the 3rd November. Mallouk read parts of A.R. Penck's "Poem for Basquiat", and the event was considered one of the most significant in New York’s modern art history.
Since Basquiat’s death, his work has rapidly increased in value. At an auction in 2017, Untitled, a painting by Basquiat, sold for $110.5 million, becoming one of the most expensive paintings for purchase of all time. It set a new record high for an American artist at auction, cementing Basquiat’s name in modern art history. In his Vogue obituary, Basquiat’s close friend and fellow artist Keith Haring wrote:
He truly created a lifetime of works in ten years. Greedily, we wonder what else he might have created [...] but the fact is that he has created enough work to intrigue generations to come. Only now will people begin to understand the magnitude of his contribution.
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