Jean-Michel Basquiat
(1960 – 1988)
«I don't listen to art critiques. I don't know anyone who needs a critic to find out what art is.»
Important painter of the 80s and emblematic figure of free-form painting, Jean-Michel Basquiat He had everything to become a legend: the first black American artist to enjoy international recognition, he had a brilliant career, consumed his life, and died prematurely at the age of 27 (in 1988 in New York) from an overdose. Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain… Born to a Puerto Rican mother and a Haitian father, Basquiat showed real artistic talent from an early age. His mother, who was sensitive to art, often took him to visit museums. the MOMA, (the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and encourages it to develop its artistic talents.
Basquiat made known in the underground scene by his graffiti and his tags (both humorous and enigmatic), on the walls of Soho and the New York subway, which he signs under the pseudonym SAMO (Same Old Shit). Friend and collaborator of’Andy Warhol (they have been working together since 1984), he quickly becomes one of the most prominent artists. The human body will inspire the artist enormously in his work; at the age of 7, he was hospitalized after a car accident (his mother, to pass the time, offered him a book on anatomy titled Gray’s Anatomy, which would later influence Basquiat); this will leave him with a deep trauma. Death is omnipresent in his work. His work (heads of dead people, flames, votive totems…), like a prophecy.
His style is very original, violent and energetic; in his paintings, one can also sense the inspirations from his Haitian and Puerto Rican origins. A painter-poet, he creates vast collages where images, signs, poems and concept words populate his paintings. On the canvas («prepared» in some places by applying color photocopies), but also on less traditional supports taken from the urban space (barriers), dark figures, words or formulas, more or less decipherable signs are inscribed, interspersed with colors. Citations taken from the media are read there, and here and there autobiographical fragments (the crown of Samo) and elements borrowed from the Voodoo cult appear. Jean Michel Basquiat’s graffiti expresses the revolt constitutive of a multi-ethnic identity and culture; he paints the history of the black people, jazz and the jazzmen he venerates. He denounces all the symbols of American consumer society, urban poverty and the exacerbated media coverage. He also paints elements taken from his life on the street (cars, buildings, police officers, children’s games, graffiti…). Racism haunts him since his earliest childhood. A majority of his paintings evoke the difficulty of being black. His creativity, which he carries within him, finds it difficult to find a place in a world predominantly white. Basquiat’s painting refers as much to primitive art, the Art brut or Cobra as to the great American tradition, from Rauschenberg to Cy Twombly. Jean-Michel Basquiat will mark the renewal of the New York art scene in the 1980s with his style. In less than ten years, he painted more than 900 paintings, many of them large formats, and created more than 1,250 drawings. Jean-Michel Basquiat thus entered and became part of the history of art like a meteor. The fury of living and the fury of painting.
