THANK YOU, 1980s: Jean-Michel Basquiat

'Untitled.' 1984. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas.

"Believe it or not, I can actually draw." ~ Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat was barely out of his teens when he--a high school drop-out from Brooklyn, born to a Haitian-American father and Puerto Rican mother--broke into the international art scene in 1981. The cue came in part when Rene Ricard published "The Radiant Child" about him and his terrific talent in Artforum.

Basquiat was--it hurts to say it--27 when he died of a drug overdose in 1988.

Those years where high-pitch passionate prolific years for Basquiat. While his work was being shown in solo exhibitions across the U.S. and Europe, he was also marked by "the abundant contradictions, the public perceptions, mythifications and self-inventions that went into the shaping of Basquiat's life and work," as writer Robert Knafo describes:

In his short life (1960-1988), Jean-Michel Basquiat came to personify the art scene of the 80s, with its merging of youth culture, money, hype, excess, and self-destruction. And then there was the work, which the public image tended to overshadow: paintings and drawings that conjured up marginal urban black culture and black history, as well as the artist's own conflicted sense of identity.

He was, all at once it seemed, the ultimate party animal, a wannabe streetkid and grafittist hiding his black Brooklyn middle class roots, an advocate and interpreter of the marginal and dispossessed at the court of the mainstream, an angry black aspirant to the all-white art canon, a precocious talent, a creature of cynical marketing and a fraud, a proto-multiculturalist, an American original.

His paintings remind me a bit of Frida Kahlo's, with their scratchiness and skeletons, the juxtaposition of vibrant colors with an obsession with mortality, the humor within the paintings' religiousity and worldliness. Something about the heightened energy in art that speaks of blood and bodies hits me hard. I love how he uses words as a visual medium in both his graffiti and his paintings.

'In Italian.' 1983. Acrylic, oil paintstick, and marker on canvas mounted on wood supports, two panels.

Before he entered Celebrityville, Basquiat built an underground fame for himself in his teens as a graffiti artist/poet who marked Lower Manhattan and signed his work "SAMO." Among his markings:

SAMO as a neo art form.

SAMO as an end to to mindwash religion, nowhere politics and bogus philosophy.

SAMO as an escape clause.

SAMO as an end to playing art.

SAMO as an end to bogus pseudo intellectual. My mouth, therefore an error. Plush safe.. he think.

SAMO as an alternative 2 playing art with the 'radical chic' sect on Daddy's $ funds.

By 1982, he was quite close with Andy Warhol, who served as something of a mentor to him up until Warhol's death in 1987; the pair also collaborated on a number of interesting works.

I first became acquainted thanks to this brilliant 1996 film (and a friend I like to call Fred Chao). And yes, that's David Bowie perfectly cast as Andy Warhol.

'Untitled.' 1984.

Image Credits: Village Savant, The Brooklyn Museum, Barnard College Library Research Guide

Comments

[freeverse21]

I love Basquiat. Good choice. It's a little weird, though, how Knafo and others have made Basquiat a symbol of 8 million different things. Who wouldn't go a little mad if they were made to be a representation rather than a person?

[DarkPrincess]

I like this tribute from Artist Bela Manson:
http://www.showyourart.net/galleries/showArtObject/5223/untitled__Noise_