Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist born in Brooklyn, New York. He gained fame, first as a graffiti artist in New York City, and then as a highly successful avant-garde artist in the international art scene of the 1980s. His father was Haitian-born Gerard Basquiat, and his mother, Matilde Andradas, had been born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents. He had two sisters, also born in Brooklyn, in 1963 and 1966.

When only a small boy, Basquiat began drawing, inspired by the cartoons and Hitchcock films he watched on television. He also loved to read comic books and Mad Magazine, with its Alfred E. Neuman character. His mother encouraged his interest in art, and when he was only seven he produced a children's book with a friend, Mark Prozzo. At age eight, Basquiat was hit by a car while he played in the street, requiring him to spend a month in the hospital. During this time his mother gave him a copy of the book, Gray's Anatomy, the influence of which was to later show up in his artwork, as well as the name of a band he co-founded in 1979, called Gray.

When his parents separated, Jean Michel Basquiat lived with his father and sisters first in Brooklyn until his father moved, with his three children, to Mira Mar, Puerto Rico Basquiat. He later moved back to New York, where he attended City as School, a progressive school in Manhattan. There he met Al Diaz, a graffitist who lived in the lower east side projects. They become friends and artistic collaborators. The two were among the most popular students at their school, both creative and also with an affinity for getting into trouble. Basquiat invented a fictional character named SAMO (for same old shit), and in 1977 he and Diaz began spray-painting witticisms 'by SAMO' around lower Manhattan.

In 1978, Basquiat left home and quit school a year before graduating. He lived with friends, including the loft of British artist Stan Peskett, and survived by selling T-shirts and postcards. In an attempt to make a sale, he approached Andy Warhol in a restaurant. He did make the sale, but it was not until some years later that the two became friends.

Basquiat began dating Alexis Adler in the late 1970s, and the two moved into an apartment, his first address of his own. Their crowd included filmmakers, musicians, and artists. Basquiat and Diaz had a falling out about that time, which ended their SAMO collaboration, and Basquiat turned his focus to his own art and music. Part of his scene were Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, and Basquiat and Haring begin an on-and-off relationship that lasted until Basquiat's death.

In 1980, Basquiat's art was exhibited for the first time in a multi-artist exhibition sponsored by Collaborative Projects Inc. Encouraged by the reception of his art, he quit his band, Gray. Basquiat's art career is known for his three broad, though overlapping styles. In the earliest period, from 1980 to late 1982, Basquiat used painterly gestures on canvas, most often depicting skeletal figures and mask-like faces that expressed his obsession with mortality, and imagery derived from his street existence, such as automobiles, buildings, police, children's sidewalk games, and graffiti.

A middle period, from late 1982 to 1985, features multi-panel paintings and individual canvases with exposed stretcher bars, the surface dense with writing, collage and seemingly unrelated imagery. These works reveal a strong interest in Basquiat's black and Hispanic identity and his identification with historical and contemporary black figures and events.

The last style, from about 1986 to Basquiat's death in 1988, displays a new type of figurative depiction, in a new painterly style, with different symbols, sources, and content.

Basquiat traveled often throughout the 1980s. In 1981, he traveled to Europe for the first time, for a one-man show in Italy, where the work was shown under the name SAMO. Traveling to Los Angeles for an exhibition in 1982, Basquiat ended up staying for about six months, enjoying the climate and club scene there. From then on he returned to LA several times a year.

In 1983, Basquiat befriended Andy Warhol and the two made a number of collaborative works. Often, they discussed and disputed about the lacking African American art and literature. They also painted together, influencing each others' work. Some claimed that Andy Warhol was merely using Basquiat for some of his techniques and insight, but this was never based on much fact, just mere speculation. Their relationship continued until Warhol's death.

In 1984, Basquiat traveled to Maui, Hawaii, a place he visited regularly from that time on. He rented a ranch in Hana, a remote part of the island, where he set up a studio to make drawings and painting with materials he had sent over from Los Angeles. Returning to New York, collaborative paintings he created with Warhol and Clemente were exhibited internationally, and Basquiat became a celebrity in his own right.  Also in 1984 he met Jennifer Goode, who was to be one of his most serious romantic affairs. Many of Basquiat's friends were concerned about his excessive drug use and increasingly erratic behavior, including signs of paranoia. At only twenty-four, his deteriorating health had become noticeable.

Basquiat appeared on the cover of New York Times Magazine in a feature entitled "New Art, New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist" in 1985.

As Basquiat's international success heightened, his works were shown in solo exhibitions across major European capitals. Basquiat travelled to Africa in 1986 and his work was shown on the Ivory Coast. Later that year Basquiat and Goode split, with her complaining of his abuse of heroin.

After Warhol's death in 1987, he became withdrawn and less productive. He had always been resistant to the idea of drug abuse programs, but in an apparent attempt to kick drugs on his own he left New York in April, 1988 for his ranch in Hawaii. There he stayed until June, when he left to return to New York. As he passed through Los Angeles, friends there found him happy and proclaiming he was free from drugs. However, on August 12, 1988, he was found in his New York loft, dead at twenty-seven from an overdose of heroin.