Jean Michel Basquiat Essay Example

Jean Michel Basquiat Paper LIFE AND TIMES OF ARTIST Jean Michel Basquiat was born on December 22, 1960 in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Gerard Basquiat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and his mother, Matilde Andradas was born in Brooklyn of Puerto Rican parents. At an early age, Basquiat displayed an aptitude for art and was encouraged by his mother to draw, paint, and to participate in other art-related activities. In 1977, when he was 17, Basquiat and his friend Al Diaz started spray-painting graffiti art on slum buildings in lower Manhattan, adding the infamous signature of SAMO (their graffiti â€Å"tag† which stood for â€Å"same old shit†). The graphics were pithy messages such as Plush safe he think†, â€Å"Pay for Soup†, Set it on Fire† and SAMO is an escape clause. SAMO’s social message was critical of mainstream culture; the style was poetic with an intellectual edge. In December 1978, the Village Voice published an article about the writings. The SAMO project ended with the epitaph SAMO IS DEAD written on the walls of SoHo buildings. In 1978, Basquiat dropped out of Edward R. Murrow High School and left home, a year before graduating. He moved into the city and lived with friends, surviving by selling T-shirts and postcards on the street. By 1979, however, Basquiat gained a certain celebrity status amidst the thriving art scene of Manhattans East Village, for his regular appearances on Glenn OBriens live public-access cable show, TV Party . In the late 1970s, Basquiat formed a band called Gray, with the then-unknown musician and actor Vincent Gallo. Gray played at clubs such as Maxs Kansas City, CBGB, Hurrahs, and the Mudd Club. Basquiat worked with Gallo again in a film Downtown 81 (a. . a New York Beat Movie) which featured some of Grays rare recordings on its soundtrack. He also appeared in Blondies video for Rapture. Basquiat first started to gain recognition as an artist in June 1980, when he participated in The Times Square Show, a multi-artist exhibition, sponsored by Collaborative Projects Incorporated (Colab). In 1981, poet, art critic and cultural provocateur Rene Ricard published The Radiant Child in Ar tforum magazine, helping to launch Basquiats career to an international stage. We will write a custom essay sample on Jean Michel Basquiat specifically for you for only $16.38 $13.9/page Order now We will write a custom essay sample on Jean Michel Basquiat specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer We will write a custom essay sample on Jean Michel Basquiat specifically for you FOR ONLY $16.38 $13.9/page Hire Writer During the next few years, he continued exhibiting his works around New York alongside artists such as Keith Haring, Barbara Kruger, as well as internationally, promoted by such gallery owners and patrons as Annina Nosei, Vrej Baghoomian, Larry Gagosian, Mary Boone and Bruno Bischofberger. By 1982, Basquiat was showing regularly alongside Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi, thus becoming part of a loose-knit group that art-writers, curators, and collectors would soon be calling the Neo-expressionist movement. He started dating an aspiring and then-unknown performer named Madonna in the fall of 1982. In 1982, Basquiat met Andy Warhol, with whom he collaborated extensively, eventually forging a close, if strained, friendship. By 1984, many of Basquiats friends were concerned about his excessive drug use and increasingly erratic behaviour, including signs of paranoia. Basquiat had developed a frequent heroin habit by this point, starting from his early years living among the junkies and street artists in New Yorks underground. On February 10, 1985, Basquiat appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in a feature entitled New Art, New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist. As Basquiats international success heightened, his works were shown in solo exhibitions across major European capitals. Basquiat died of mixed-drug toxicity (he had been combining cocaine and heroin, known as speedballing) in his Great Jones Street loft/studio in 1988 several days before what would have been Basquiats second trip to the Cote dIvoire. After his death, a film biography entitled Basquiat was made, directed by Julian Schnabel, with actor Jeffrey Wright playing Basquiat. ARTIST STYLE Basquiats art career is known for his three broad, though overlapping styles. In the earliest period, from 1980 to late 1982, Basquiat used painterly gestures on canvas, often depicting skeletal figures and mask-like faces that expressed his obsession with mortality. Other frequently depicted imagery such as automobiles, buildings, police, childrens sidewalk games, and graffiti came from his experience painting on the city streets. A middle period from late 1982 to 1985 featured multipanel paintings and individual canvases with exposed stretcher bars the surface dense with writing, collage and seemingly unrelated imagery. INTERPRETATION These works reveal a strong interest in Basquiats black and Haitian identity and his identification with historical and contemporary black figures and events. On one occasion Basquiat painted his girlfriends dress, with his words, a Little Shit Brown. The final period, from about 1986 to Basquiats death in 1988, displays a new type of figurative depiction, in a new style with different symbols and content from new sources. This period seems to have also had a profound impact on the styles of artists who admired Basquiats work. Basquiats lasting creative influence is immediately recognizable in the work of subsequent and self-taught generational artists such as Mark Gonzales, Kelly D. Williams, and Raymond Morris. In 1982, Basquiat became friends with pop artist Andy Warhol and the two made a number of collaborative works. They also painted together, influencing each others work. Some speculated that Andy Warhol was merely using Basquiat for some of his techniques and insight. Their relationship continued until Warhols death in 1987. Warhols death was very distressing for Basquiat, and it is speculated by Phoebe Hoban, in Basquiat, her 1998 biography on the artist, that Warhols death was a turning point for Basquiat, and that afterwards his drug addiction and depression began to spiral. ART VALUE Up until 2002, the highest mark that was paid for an original work of Basquiats was $3,302,500 (set on 12 November 1998). On 14 May 2002 Basquiats Profit I (a large piece of art measuring 86. 5 by 157. 5), owned by heavy metal band Metallica co-founder Lars Ulrich, was put up for auction at Christies. It was there that the highest mark for a work of Basquiats was set when Profit I sold for $5,509,500. The proceedings of the auction are documented in the film Some Kind of Monster. On 15 May 2007, an untitled Basquiat work from 1981 smashed his previous record, selling at Sothebys in New York for $14. 6 million.