Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1960. His mother was of Puerto Rican heritage, and his father a Haitian immigrant, the combination of which eventually led to the young Jean-Michel’s fluency in French, Spanish, and English (indeed, early readings of French symbolist poetry would come to influence Basquiat’s later work).
Basquiat displayed a talent for art in early childhood, learning to draw and paint with his mother’s encouragement. Together they attended New York City museum exhibitions, and by the age of six, Jean-Michel found himself already enrolled as a Junior Member of the Brooklyn Museum.
Basquiat’s art was fundamentally rooted in the 1970s, New York City-based graffiti movement. In 1972, he and an artist friend, Al Diaz, started spray-painting buildings in Lower Manhattan under the nom de plume, SAMO, an acronym for “Same Old Shit”. With its anti-establishment, anti-religion, anti-politics credo packaged in an ultra-contemporary format, SAMO soon received media attention from the counter-culture press, the Village Voice the most notable among them.
When Basquiat and Diaz had a falling out, Basquiat ended the project with the terse message: SAMO IS DEAD, which appeared on the facade of many SoHo art galleries and downtown buildings. After taking note of the mantra, contemporary street artist, Keith Haring, staged a mock wake for SAMO at his Club 57. Homeless and sleeping on park benches, Basquiat supported himself by panhandling, dealing drugs, and peddling hand-painted postcards and T-shirts.
Un his short and life, Jean-Michel Basquiat came to play an important and historic role in the rise of Punk Art and Neo-Expressionism in the New York art scene. While the larger public latched on to the superficial exoticism of his work and were captivated by his overnight celebrity, his art, often described inaccurately as “naif” and “ethnically gritty”, held important connections to expressive precursors, such as Jean Dubuffet and Cy Twombly.
The recipient of posthumous retrospectives at the Brooklyn Museum (2005) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1992), as well as the subject of numerous biographies and documentaries, including Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (2010; Tamra Davis, Dir.), and Julian Schnabel’s feature film, Basquiat (1996; starring former friend David Bowie as Andy Warhol), Basquiat and his counter-cultural example persist. His art remains a constant source of inspiration for contemporary artists, his short, but seemingly epic life a constant source of intrigue for a global art-loving public.
In 2017,Jean-Michel Basquiat joined “joined the pantheon of great, great artists” when the late painter’s 1982 work Untitled sold for a record-breaking $110.5 million at auction — the highest sum ever paid at auction for a U.S.-produced artwork. Basquiat died several years after creating the work/, overdosing on heroin in 1988 at age 27.