#Muse bar painting series#
The saying "SAMO" had started as a private joke between Basquiat and his schoolmate Al Diaz, as an abbreviation for the phrase "Same old shit." They drew a series of cartoons for their school paper before and after using SAMO©. He developed the character SAMO to endorse a faux religion. He would skip school with his friends, but still received encouragement from his teachers, and began to write and illustrate for the school newspaper. In the 10th grade, he enrolled at City-As-School, an alternative high school in Manhattan, home to many artistic students who found conventional schooling difficult. Eventually, his father spotted him with a shaved head and called the police to bring him home. He slept on park benches at Washington Square Park and took acid. He ran away from home at 15 when his father caught him smoking pot in his room. He struggled to deal with his mother's instability and rebelled as a teenager. When they returned to Brooklyn in 1976, Basquiat attended Edward R. īasquiat's family resided in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Boerum Hill and then in 1974, moved to Miramar, Puerto Rico. By the age of eleven, Basquiat was fluent in French, Spanish and English, and an avid reader of all three languages. His mother was committed to a psychiatric hospital when he was ten and thereafter spent her life in and out of institutions. After his parents separated that year, Basquiat and his sisters were raised by their father. While he was hospitalized, his mother brought him a copy of Gray's Anatomy to keep him occupied. His arm was broken and he suffered several internal injuries, which required a splenectomy. In 1968, Basquiat was hit by a car while playing in the street at the age of seven. There he met his friend Marc Prozzo and together they created a children's book, written by Basquiat at the age of seven and illustrated by Prozzo. In 1967, he started attending Saint Ann's School, a private school. His mother encouraged her son's artistic talent and he often tried to draw his favorite cartoons. Basquiat was a precocious child who learned to read and write by the age of four. Matilde instilled a love for art in her young son by taking him to local art museums and enrolling him as a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. His father was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and his mother was born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents.
He had an older brother, Max, who died shortly before his birth, and two younger sisters, Lisane (b. In 2017, Untitled, a 1982 painting depicting a black skull with red and yellow rivulets, sold for a record-breaking $110.5 million, becoming one of the most expensive paintings ever purchased.īiography Early life: 1960–1977 īasquiat was born on December 22, 1960, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York City, the second of four children to Matilde Basquiat (née Andrades, 1934–2008) and Gérard Basquiat (1930–2013). Since his death at the age of 27 in 1988, Basquiat's work has steadily increased in value. His visual poetics were acutely political and direct in their criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle. He used social commentary in his paintings as a tool for introspection and for identifying with his experiences in the black community, as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism. He appropriated poetry, drawing, and painting, and married text and image, abstraction, figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique.
The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his artwork in 1992.īasquiat's art focused on dichotomies such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. At 22, he was one of the youngest to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial in New York. At 21, Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever take part in Documenta in Kassel, Germany. By the early 1980s, his paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. Jean-Michel Basquiat ( French: Decem– August 12, 1988) was an American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement.īasquiat first achieved fame as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, alongside Al Diaz, writing enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of Manhattan's Lower East Side during the late 1970s, where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop music culture.
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