Jean-Michel Basquiat

This reader provides a concise introduction to the widely popular yet oft-misunderstood artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. Guided by the steady hand of Basquiat scholar Larry Warsh, it is one of the few books of this kind to be directly approved by the artist’s estate and family: a notable distinction amid all of the buzz.
Jean-Michel Basquiat Handbook begins with a portrait of the young Basquiat, from his years as a precocious child in Brooklyn, to his rebellious teenagedom, to his meteoric rise in fame, to his tragic early death. The book then discusses the development of his groundbreaking style through the recurrent themes of his practice: urban life, the human figure, music and sports, to name just a few. The backend of the book provides a sampling of sketches from Basquiat’s notebooks, a chronology and incisive essays from scholars Henry Geldzahler and Henry Louis Gates Jr.
One of the first African American artists to reach international stature and wealth in the art world, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88) was celebrated for his fusion of multicultural symbols, social commentary and distinctive graphic style. He has been the subject of numerous exhibitions across the globe, and his work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, among many others.

This catalog focuses on eight paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat made in the summer of 1982, when he traveled to Modena, Italy, for one of his first solo exhibitions in Europe at the gallery of Emilio Mazzoli. Within the span of just a few days, Basquiat painted a group of large-format paintings that surpassed his previous work in both scale and method. Each measuring around 6.5 by 13 feet, these works mark Basquiat’s transition from creating graffiti in the streets of Manhattan to painting on canvas. The conception and occasion of the exhibition ultimately proved fraught, and instead of conceding to pressure and expectations, Basquiat canceled the show. The paintings–including masterpieces that today are considered pivotal and among the most outstanding of his oeuvre–have never been shown together. This catalog revisits this crucial moment of Basquiat’s career and reunites them for the first time.
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88) grew up in Brooklyn. Notoriety came early, from his street paintings made under the tag SAMO. Later he stormed the gallery world, and became an icon of New York's vibrant early-’80s downtown scene, a friend to and collaborator with Andy Warhol and Francesco Clemente, and the cover boy for a 1985 New York Times Magazine story on the new art market. He died following a heroin overdose at 27.

Bringing together a range of unconventional painted supports and found-object sculptures, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art and Objecthood provides an innovative, in-depth look into the artist’s sculptural practice. In addition to painting and drawing on everything within his domestic spaces—refrigerators, chairs, cabinets—Basquiat made use of discarded windows and doors, mirrors, wood boards and subway tiles in his earliest creations. In a 1985 interview with Becky Johnston and Tamra Davis, he explained: “The first paintings I made were on windows I found on the street. And I used the window shape as a frame, and I just put the painting on the glass part and on doors I found on the street.”
Jean-Michel Basquiat: Art and Objecthood borrows its title from the influential 1967 essay by renowned art historian Michael Fried, who critiqued Minimalism for its dogmatic separation between “art” and “object,” arguing that its presentation of isolated objects as art was theatrics rather than a true art, which for Fried implied the unity of art and object. Invoking Fried’s stance, this book invites viewers to consider the debate on art and objecthood as a lens through which to consider Basquiat’s uses of objects. The book also demonstrates the extent to which these uses reveal his dedication to the struggle against social inequality and his profound engagement with the politics of race in the US.

In the early 1980s, art and writing labeled as graffiti began to transition from New York City walls and subway trains onto canvas and into art galleries. Young artists who freely sampled from their urban experiences and their largely Black, Latinx and immigrant histories infused the downtown art scene with expressionist, pop and graffiti-inspired compositions.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88) became the galvanizing, iconic frontrunner of this transformational and insurgent movement in contemporary American art, which resulted in an unprecedented fusion of creative energies that defied longstanding racial divisions. Writing the Future features Basquiat’s works in painting, sculpture, drawing, video, music and fashion, alongside works by his contemporaries—and sometimes collaborators—A-One, ERO, Fab 5 Freddy, Futura, Keith Haring, Kool Koor, LA2, Lady Pink, Lee Quiñones, Rammellzee and Toxic. Throughout the 1980s, these artists fueled new directions in fine art, design and music, reshaping the predominantly white art world and driving the now-global popularity of hip-hop culture.

Writing the Future, published to accompany a major exhibition, contextualizes Basquiat’s work in relation to his peers associated with hip-hop culture. It also marks the first time Basquiat’s extensive, robust and reflective portraiture of his Black and Latinx friends and fellow artists has been given prominence in scholarship on his oeuvre. With contributions from Carlo McCormick, Liz Munsell, Hua Hsu, J. Faith Almiron and Greg Tate, Writing the Future captures the energy, inventiveness and resistance unleashed when hip-hop hit the city.

Jean-Michel Basquiat's (1960–88) formal vocabulary was inspired by the precedents of Picasso, Matisse and Twombly; he drew overtly on their fondness for primary colors, fragmented subjects, disturbing faces, dissonant colors and forms, and crudely crafted compositions or objects. Like them, he eschewed virtuosity and appealed instead to naivety and ungainliness, to restore raw energy to art.

Basquiat Remix looks at the artist's paintings alongside a range of works by Picasso, Matisse and Twombly from the Collection Lambert in Paris, as well as from private collections and major institutions. It celebrates his ability to mix and recombine sources, and to balance both visceral effect and self-awreness. The book includes an interview with Yvon Lambert in which he recounts his relationship with the artist.

Jean-Michel Basquiat painted Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart) on the wall of Keith Haring’s studio in 1983 to commemorate the death of a young black artist who died from injuries sustained while in police custody after being arrested for allegedly tagging a New York City subway station. Defacement is the starting point for the present volume, which focuses on Basquiat’s response to anti-black racism and police brutality. Basquiat’s “Defacement”: The Untold Story explores this chapter in the artist’s career through both the lens of his identity and the Lower East Side as a nexus of activism in the early 1980s, an era marked by the rise of the art market, the AIDS crisis and ongoing racial tensions in the city.

Texts by Chaédria LaBouvier, Nancy Spector, J. Faith Almiron and Greg Tate are supplemented by commentary from artists and activists such as Luc Sante, Carlo McCormick, Jeffrey Deitch, Kenny Scharf, Fred Braithwaite and Michelle Shocked, who were part of this episode in New York City’s history, which parallels today’s urgent conversations about state-sanctioned racism. Basquiat’s painting is contextualized by ephemera related to Stewart’s death, including newspaper clippings and protest posters, samples of artwork from Stewart’s estate and work made by other artists in response to Stewart’s death and the subsequent trial, including pieces by Haring, Andy Warhol, David Hammons, George Condo and Lyle Ashton Harris.

Chaédria LaBouvier is a writer and Basquiat scholar. In fall 2016, she organized a one-work exhibition of the artist’s painting "Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart)" (1983) for the Reading Room at Williams College Museum of Art.

Nancy Spector is Artistic Director and Jennifer and David Stockman Chief Curator of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation.

J. Faith Almiron is Assistant Professor of African-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research focuses on the role of art, visual culture, and performance in relation to social transformation.

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Xerox provides the first concentrated examination of the extraordinary body of work that the artist created using Xerox copies as his principal medium and compositional focal point. These immersive, collaged Xerox paintings epitomize Basquiat’s extraordinary instinct for visual language. Their raw, allover compositions incorporate recycled and transformed signs and markings from the artist’s everyday experiences, including motifs from his earlier artworks.

The intricate web of content in this series presages the copy-paste sampling characteristic of the subsequent internet and post-internet generations, positioning Basquiat as a pioneer of the pre-digital age.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88) grew up in Brooklyn. Notoriety came early, from his street paintings made under the tag SAMO. Later he stormed the gallery world, and became an icon of New York's vibrant early-’80s downtown scene, a friend to and collaborator with Andy Warhol and Francesco Clemente, and the cover boy for a 1985 New York Times Magazine story on the new art market. He died following a heroin overdose at 27.

In the wild New York of the 1980s, Jean-Michel Basquiat was the first African-American artist to receive art-world attention. The complexity and trailblazing innovative power of his paintings has been widely discussed, but this book focuses on the treatment of language in Basquiat’s ouevre. With its complex structures, spontaneous rhythms and sampled, collage-like manifestations, his work was drawn into the orbit of the Beat Generation poets and the protagonists of the musical avant-garde. The multitalented Basquiat created a shimmering, syncopated fabric of images and text, which the American curator and critic Robert Storr aptly called “eye rap.” It was with this unpretentious and spontaneous way of working that Basquiat rewrote art history.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) grew up in Brooklyn. His first notoriety came when he was making street paintings under the tag SAMO. Later he stormed the gallery world, and became an icon of New York's vibrant early-80s downtown scene, a friend to and collaborator with Andy Warhol and Francesco Clemente, and the cover boy for a 1985 New York Times Magazine story on the new art market. His death following a heroin overdose at 27 did not by any means decrease interest in his work, which was recently the subject of a retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, New York.

Controversial cult artist, enfant terrible of the art world, friend of Haring and Warhol, and both idol and a victim of the art scene of the '80s-Jean-Michel Basquiat was a legend in his own lifetime. This catalog, published in conjunction with the major retrospective at the Lugano Museum of Modern Art, provides an excellent overview of Basquiat's life and work. As an African-American painter, Basquiat has made a significant impact on the history of contemporary art. From his origins as a street graffiti artist, he became one of the most influential artists of his time: in 2005 his work is being celebrated in seperate exhibitions in the US and Europe. As emblems of the contemporary world, his explosive, colorful, and apparently naéf canvases have an unparalleled force. The brief but intense artistic career of this celebrated proponent of the downtown New York art scene of the 1980s is covered through some fifty paintings and twenty works on paper drawn from prestigious private collections and museums. This book offers a new intense dialogue with the more modern expressions of twentieth-century art.

Rudy Chiappini is Director of the Lugano Modern Art Museum.