Jean-Michel
Basquiat

Born in 1960 in Brooklyn, a New York City borough that was then far from gentrification, it was first and foremost in its streets that Jean-Michel Basquiat’s talent found both the setting and the source of his expression. While still a teenager, Basquiat adorned the city’s walls with aphorisms, observations, and poetic imperatives that he signed with the acronym SAMO©—short for the English expression “Same Old Shit”. He quickly expanded his visual language with lessons drawn from Gray’s Anatomy, a book his mother had given him during a hospital stay. An active figure in New York’s underground scene—where he was also a member of an experimental rock band called Gray—his meteoric rise and destructive ascent to global fame led him, shortly before his untimely death in 1988 (he was only 27), to a legendary collaboration with Andy Warhol, the undisputed high priest of Pop Art. Just a few years earlier, he had sold Warhol one of the postcards he was decorating and selling on the sly to make ends meet.

Basquiat’s aesthetic produces an erratic, colorful, and energetic blend—balanced yet largely improvised—of iconographic and textual references to African American culture (boxing champions, jazz icons, rising stars of hip-hop) and personal symbols (including the crown) intended to glorify it. Basquiat channels this aesthetic, infused with the ferocity of street art and a formal freedom that encompasses collage, drawing, painting, silkscreen printing, and graffiti, toward highly anxiety-inducing subjects: the structural marginalization of African Americans and the physical decline of the body leading to death—a theme that obsessed him. This formal chaos, characterized by controlled spontaneity, thus blurs the boundary between so-called high and low cultures, and has secured Basquiat’s place in the canon of contemporary art history and the visual culture of the 20th and 21st centuries.