Jean-Michel Basquiat | Artist
Jean-Michel Basquiat died in 1987 at the age of 27, tragically joining that illustrious group of brilliant yet ill-fated artists known as the "27 Club". While primarily a visual artist, Basquiat was also active in NYC's underground music scene.
Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist and musician born 1960 in New York City. Basquiat rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement and was active in NYC's no-wave music scene of the early 1980's. Born the second of four children to Matilde Andrades and Gérard Basquiat, his father was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and his mother was born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents. Matilde instilled a love for art in her 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 and by the age of eleven was fluent in French, Spanish and English. He attended Saint Ann's Private School where 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. Basquiat and his sisters were raised mainly 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. He was enrolled at City-As-School, an alternative high school in Manhattan, where he began to write and illustrate for the school newspaper. He developed the character SAMO to endorse a faux religion. Basquiat first achieved notoriety in the late 1970s as part of the graffiti duo SAMO ("same old shit"), alongside Al Diaz, writing satirical advertising slogans such as "SAMO© AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO GOD." all over Manhattan, particularly in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop culture. Around this time Basquiat befriended many other struggling young artists who would later become famous. He lived with and dated Madonna before she made the big time, was friends with artist Keith Haring, and spent time (and did drugs) with actor-musician John Lurie. He also sold his first painting "Cadillac Moon" to Debbie Harry, lead singer of Blondie, for $200 after they had filmed Downtown 81 together. 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 Max's Kansas City, CBGB, Hurrah and the Mudd Club. By the early 1980s, Basquiat's paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. At 21, he became the youngest artist to ever take part in Documenta in Kassel, Germany. At 22, he became 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. 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. In the last 18 months of his life Basquiat became something of a recluse. His increased drug use is thought to have been a way of coping after the death of his friend Andy Warhol in February 1987. However his drug use started when he was much younger. 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. Basquiat died at the age of 27 of a heroin overdose at his home on Great Jones Street in Manhattan on August 12, 1988. While some art critics such as Robert Hughes dismissed Basquiat's work as absurd, attributing the Basquiat phenomenon as "a mixture of hype, overproduction, and a greedy art market", others point to how he actively participated in shaping black cultural expression during the 1980s: "his works, much like the art of graffiti, blur the lines between high art and street culture, reinforcing the legitimacy of non-traditional forms of black expression."
Artist Website : basquiat.com
Featured Albums: Basquiat
Related Artists: Gray, Madonna, John Lurie, Deborah Harry
Collections: 27 Forever
