Jean-Michel Basquiat, who would proceed to become one of the most influential artists of the world, had to go through years of struggle before his dream came true. His unwillingness to accept authorities and his rebellious attitude, made him leave home to live on the streets of Manhattan, without ever finishing school. Nevertheless, Basquiat was far from uneducated. His father, an accountant of Haitian origin and his mother, an artistic spirit coming from a Puerto-Rican family, divorced when Basquiat was eight years old. This happened after the young Jean-Michel was hit by a car playing in the streets and suffered serious internal injuries, which left him to recover in hospital for a month. The recurring theme of car crashes in his later work can be directly linked to his traumatic experience.
While still in school, he met Al Diaz, an member of the early graffiti scene, and eventually developed the character SAMO© out of a drug induced conversation. Basquiat went ahead and drew comic strips featuring SAMO© as a character in a “Religio-mat”, selling sham religions: a false answer to everything. As a young adolescent, aged seventeen, Basquiat decided to carve out his own way and for the following years he would live without any financial support, earning very little by selling postcards and T-shirts he painted in the streets of Downtown Manhattan. Taking odd jobs, staying here and there with friends for a night, Basquiat incessantly drew. Lacking the funds to buy canvases, he would draw on anything from refrigerator doors to windows, tables, walls, paper bags or whatever he could get his hands on, covering uncounted objects with his drawings. Working together with his friend Al Diaz, he went on to develop his own style of text-based graffiti, always tagged with SAMO©, that would get him noticed both in the quickly developing graffiti-scene and the wider public. Aimed at the art community and critically commenting on it, the short lines of text appeared around art schools and galleries in SoHo. The three-pointed crown symbol, which Basquiat would later often use in his paintings had its roots in that time, as graffiti writers who managed to spread their tags widely and thus became known would be called “kings”, adding a crown to their tags.
Even though Basquiat never had any training as an artist, he was drawn to the School of Visual Arts, and befriended some of the students. Among them was Keith Haring, with whom he developed a close friendship. A year after his arrival in New York in 1978, Haring started to notice what he later called the “literary graffiti… the little poems and conceptual statements” to be seen everywhere around Downtown Manhattan and found out, that SAMO© was in fact Jean-Michel Basquiat. They began to exhibit alongside each other in off-space shows, long before both were accepted into established galleries.
Basquiat’s first major success was brokered by Diego Cortez, a curator who saw Basquiat’s talent and included him in an avant-garde show titled “New York/New Wave”. Cortez started to work as an agent for Basquiat, selling a few works to Bruno Bischofberger. Bischofberger, who started 1963 with a gallery in Zürich, exhibited American Pop-Artists, among them Andy Warhol, Roy Liechtenstein, Tom Wesselmann and Jasper Johns. He was reluctant to organize a show with Basquiat at the time, even though later he would become one of his most important gallerists. Cortez introduced Basquiat’s work to another European gallerist, Emilio Mazzoli. He offered Basquiat an exhibition in Modena, Italy, and invited Basquiat to arrive two weeks prior to the opening to produce further paintings. The show sold out and Basquiat returned to New York, with more money than he ever had before.
Shortly after, in 1981 Annina Nosei, who had a gallery in SoHo, started representing Basquiat and gave him the basement of her gallery to use as his studio. When Nosei started planning a group show titled Public Address with artists Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring and Barbara Kruger, thematised social and political issues, Basquiat wanted to be included. Basquiat started to paint large formats – figurative works with neo-expressionist tendencies – for the show. Among them, was one of his most famous works Untitled (Skull), a huge head of a man in three-quarter view, with clenched teeth and criss-crossed lines which run like stitches across the face on a brightly coloured background.
Basquiat’s stellar rise happened within the shortest time in 1981, his paintings were often sold by Annina Nosei before they were even finished, as collectors streamed into Basquiat’s basement studio, often interrupting his work. The perception of him working out of the gallery basement was not only positive. Critical contemporaries, so for example his friend and prominent figure of the New York graffiti scene, Fab 5 Freddy (Frederick Brathwaite) said: “A black kid painting in a basement. It’s not good man.” Basquiat countered at the time: “Oh Christ, if I was white, they would just say artist-in-residence.”
In December 1981 the milestone article “The Radiant Child” by René Ricard was published in Artforum, making Basquiat known to an international audience. Discussing Basquiat’s style Ricard famously wrote: “If Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet had a baby and gave it up for adoption, it would be Jean-Michel.” At 22, he was the youngest artist to be included at the Whitney Biennial in New York. Basquiat’s art focused on dichotomies such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. Appropriating poetry, combining text and image, he mixed historical information with contemporary critique. Basquiat used social commentary in his paintings as a tool for introspection and for identifying with his experiences in the black community of his time, as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism. His visual poetics were acutely political and direct in their criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle. Immediate influences in his art can be seen in Cy Twobley’s integration of writing in his work, Picasso’s introduction of elements of African culture into western art, and surely in Jean Dubuffet’s Art Brut. Basquiat was on one hand very aware of the work of old masters like Leonardo Da Vinci, and on the other he took impulses from his contemporaries or close predecessors, like Andy Warhol, A. R. Penck, Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi.
Even during his time selling postcards and living on the streets, Basquiat tried multiple times to connect with his idol, Andy Warhol, who at the time already was an internationally acclaimed artist, a star of New York’s art scene. Warhol bought a few of those postcards from time to time, but it only happened years later that Basquiat was invited to Warhol’s Factory. Bruno Bischofberger initialled a polaroid portrait session with Warhol and Basquiat. Wanting to impress the older artist, Basquiat ran out of the studio after the sitting, and painted the famous canvas Dos Cabezas a double portrait showing Warhol next to Basquiat. The young artist frantically painted himself next to Warhol, and had the painting delivered within two hours, still dripping wet, to the Factory. Andy Warhol was impressed by the speed and probably by the enthusiastic gesture of Basquiat and shortly after the two started collaborating.
Basquiat’s and Warhol’s acquaintance soon went further than mere collaboration, they became close friends and from mid 1983 to 1985 they were inseparable. Devastated by Andy Warhol’s sudden death on February 22, 1987, Basquiat became more and more depressed and succumbed to his long-time habit of drug abuse. Jean-Michel Basquiat died at the age of only 28 in 1988, caused by an overdose of opiates. Before his death he created a triptych in memory of Andy Warhol. It was made out of a wooden door and two attached boards, painted with a black flower and a cross on the left, a red heart and a white mask (or skull) on the right and the word “Perishable” written twice and crossed out on the center piece.
Major retrospective exhibitions of Basquiat’s œvre were shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1993, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel in 2010 and the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris. In 2018/19 the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, held a large exhibition, and another recent major exhibition of Basquiat was held 2019 at the Brant Foundation in East Village, New York.