Jean Michel Basquiat Monograph

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Monograph displaying and
describing the work of
Jean Michel Basquiat
RA A
CH
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ILD
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BIOGRAPHY 3
EARLY YEARS 5
SYNOPSIS 5
ARTWORK 8
Scull 11
Notary 12
Untitled 1982 15
Arm and Hammer II 1985 17
Fexible 1982 18
Untitled History of the Black People 21
KEY IDEAS 22
PERSONAL PROBLEMS 22
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BIOGRAPHY
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SYNOPSIS
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born on December 22, 1960, in Brooklyn, New
York. He first attracted attention for his graffiti under the name “SAMO”
in New York City. He sold sweatshirts and postcards featuring his artwork
on the streets before his painting career took off. He collaborated with
Andy Warhol in the mid-1980s, which resulted in a show of their work.
Basquiat died on August 12, 1988, in New York City.
EARLY YEARS
Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn, New York, on December
22, 1960. With a Haitian-American father and a Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat’s
diverse cultural heritage was one of his many sources of inspiration.
A self-taught artist, Basquiat began drawing at an early age on sheets
of paper his father, an accountant, brought home from the office. As he
delved deeper into his creative side, his mother strongly encouraged to
pursue artistic talents.
Basquiat first attracted attention for his graffiti in New York City in the late
1970s, under the name “SAMO.” Working with a close friend, he tagged
subway trains and Manhattan buildings with cryptic aphorisms.
In 1977, Basquiat quit high school a year before he was slated to graduate.
To make ends meet, he sold sweatshirts and postcards featuring his artwork
on the streets of his native New York.
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COMMERCIAL SUCCESS
His rise coincided with the emergence of a new art movement, Noe-Expressionism,
ushering in a wave of new, young and experimental artists
that included Julian Schnabel and Susan Rothenberg.
In the mid 1980s, Basquiat collaborated with famed pop artist Andy Warhol,
which resulted in a show of their work that featured a series of corporate
logos and cartoon characters.
On his own, Basquiat continued to exhibit around the country and the
world. In 1986, he traveled to Africa for a show in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
That same year, the 25-year-old exhibited nearly 60 paintings at the Kestner-Gesellschaft
Gallery in Hanover, Germany—becoming the youngest
artist to ever showcase his work there.
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I am not a black artist
I am an artist
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Scull (1981) Acrylic and crayon on canvas- Private Collection
SKULL
An example of Basquiat’s early canvas-based work, Untitled (Skull)
features a patchwork skull that seems the pictorial equivalent of
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein - a sum of incongruent parts. Suspended
before a New York City subway map-like background, the skull
is at once a contemporary graffitist’s riff on a long Western tradition
of self portraiture and the “signature piece” of some anonymous,
streetwise miscreant. Basquiat’s recent past as a gritty curbside
peddler, virtually homeless floater, and occasional nightclub interloper
are all equally stamped into this troubled three-quarter profile,
making for a world-weary icon of the displaced Puerto-Rican
and Haitian immigrant Basquiat forever seemed to remain even
while successfully navigating the newly gentrified streets that were
1980s SoHo.
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NOTARY
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Notary (1983) Acrylic and crayon on canvas- Private Collection
A key work that serves as an example of Basquiat’s
combinatory style is Notary, which he finished in March
1983. The piece consists of a complex layering of images
and symbols from Greek mythology, Roman history,
and African tribal culture, among others. In the center
of the painting is a black male torso, that includes
both the black flesh and facial features and the internal
workings, such as the neurological wiring in the head,
the spine and several organs. The depiction is similar to
that in Untitled (Head), only that in Notary the combination
with other stylistic means adds to the immense
complexity of the painting.
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Acrylic and oil paint stick on canvas - The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat
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UNTITLED 1982
Like a page pulled cleanly from a daily artist's journal, this untitled canvas
features Basquiat's personal iconography, some reminiscent of that of
Paul Klee. Boldy appropriating images commonly associated with African
art - a skull, a bone, an arrow - Basquiat modernizes them with his
Noe-Expressionist style of thickly applied paint, rapidly rendered subjects,
and scrawled linear characters, all of which float loosely across the
pictorial field, as though hallucinatory. A white skull juts from the center
of the ebony composition, vividly recalling a revered painter's tradition of
the memento mori - a reminder of the ephemeral nature of all life and the
body's eventual, merciless degeneration. Basquiat demonstrates in one
concise "study" how he is able to carry on an ancient practice of painting
"still life", all the while suggesting, as does a great jazz musician, that the
artist's work was relatively effortless, if not completely improvisatory.
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Acrylic and silkscreen on canvas - Gallery Bruno Bischofberger AG

ARM AND HAMMER II 1985
Typical of their collaboration, "Arm and Hammer II" demonstrates how
Basquiat and Warhol would pass a work between them for their mutual
intervention, like a game of chance happening, free association, and
mutual inspiration. Warhol's characteristic employment of corporate logos
and advertising copy as shorthand signs for the materialistic modern psyche
is frequently overlaid by Basquiat's only partially successful attempt
to deface them, or otherwise "humanize" them, freehand, as though he
were vainly railing his fist at a largely invisible and insidious monster.
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FLEXIBLE 1982
Artwork description & Analysis: Flexible features two of Basquiat's most
famous motifs: the griot and the venerable crown. A sole black figure,
half cadaver, half living entity, stares "blindly" at the viewer, its arms
creating a closed circuit, perhaps a reference to spiritualized energy.
With few distinguishing characteristics, the subject takes on the visage
of the Everyman. At the same time, this is not just any figure, but one of
African ethnicity and proud heritage a clear reference to Basquiat's own
identity (note the diagrammatic rendering of the figure's lungs and abdomen,
reminiscent of the young Basquiat's fascination for Gray's Anatomy
sketches). Given that the griot is traditionally a kind of wandering philosopher,
street performer, and social commentator all in one, it is probable
that Basquiat saw himself in this role within the New York art world, one
that nurtured his artistic success but also swiftly exploited it for material
profit.
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Acrylic and oil paint stick on wood - The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat
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Acrylic paint and oil paint stick on panel - The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat

UNTITLED HISTORY OF THE
BLACK PEOPLE 1983
As though he were reconstructing an epic history, or precedent, for his
own ancestors’ arrival on the American continent, this expansive work of
the early 1980s compresses together the relationship of Egypt to Africa,
with references to more local centers of African-American music and
greater southern culture, such as Memphis, Tennessee. At the center of
the painting, Basquiat depicts a yellow Egyptian boat being guided down
the Nile River by the god Osiris. Rife with visual and textual references
to African history, the painting tackles a heady subject with a deceptively
naive style. Basquiat’s late-period works feature multi-panel paintings,
in the tradition of Renaissance religious triptychs, and canvases with
exposed stretcher bars. Often the surfaces of these pieces are virtually
consumed by their own freight of dense writing, collage,
and abstruse imagery.
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KEY IDEAS
• Basquiat’s work is one of the few examples of how an early 1980s American
Punk, or graffiti-based and counter-cultural practice could become
a fully recognized, critically embraced and popularly celebrated artistic
phenomenon, indeed not unlike the rise of American Hip Hop during the
same era.
• Despite his work’s “unstudied” appearance, Basquiat very skillfully and
purposefully brought together in his art a host of disparate traditions,
practices, and styles to create a unique kind of visual collage, one deriving,
in part, from his urban origins, and in another a more distant, African-Caribbean
heritage.
• For some critics, Basquiat’s swift rise to fame and equally swift and tragic
death by drug overdose epitomizes and personifies the overly commercial,
hyped up international art scene of the mid 1980s, a cultural
phenomenon that for many observers was symptomatic of the largely
artificial bubble economy of the era.
• Basquiat’s work is an example of how American artists of the 1980s could
reintroduce the human figure in their work after the wide success of Minimalism
and Conceptual-ism, thus establishing a dialogue with the more
distant tradition of 1950s Abstract Expressionism.
PERSONAL PROBLEMS
As his popularity soared, so did Basquiat’s personal problems. By the mid-
1980s, friends became increasingly concerned by his excessive drug use.
He became paranoid and isolated himself from the world around him for
long stretches. Desperate to kick a heroin addiction, he left New York for
Hawaii in 1988, returning a few months later and claiming to be sober.
Sadly, he wasn’t. Basquiat died of a drug overdose on August 12, 1988,
in New York City. He was 27 years old. Although his art career was brief,
Jean-Michel Basquiat has been credited with bringing the African-American
and Latino experience in the elite art world.
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THANKS FOR READING
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Knock Out Punch, Andy Warhol & Jean-Michel Basquiat Studio, New York July 10, 1985
Silver Print Silver Gelatin Print Signed, titled, dated, and numbered on verso
Photograph by Michael Halsband
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