Who was Jean-Michel Basquiat, the world’s most sought-after black genius and artist?
- Ronald Avila-Claudio – @ronaldavilapr
- BBC News World
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Jean Michel-Basquiat in 1985
It was 1978, and pop star Andy Warhol was with art critic Henry Geldzahler at a restaurant in Soho, New York.
A young black man notices them from the sidelines and decides to approach them with several postcards of his own design in hand. The King of Pop buys her one, her partner rejects the teenager and calls her a kid.
This daring 17-year-old named Jean-Michel-Basquiat was to become an important artist in the city of skyscrapers just three years after this meeting. And in less than a decade, he would be as internationally recognized as the admired Warhol.
Today, nearly three decades after his untimely death in 1988, he is the most sought-after black artist in history.
His “primitive” paintings of significant historical events, often related to urban culture and the reality of the black and Latino community, sell for millions of dollars.
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Titled “Untitled” (1982), this work was sold at auction at Sotheby’s for approximately 68.2 billion CFA francs.
In 2018, his Untitled (1982), depicting a colored skull painted in thick lines, was sold at Sotheby’s for US$110.5 million (approximately CFA 68.2 billion), the highest ever for an American artist at the time. is an indicator. .
Born on December 22, 1960 to a Haitian-American father and Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat rose from the streets to success without ever attending art school. He didn’t even finish high school.
Boy from Brooklyn
For some, like Franklin Sirmans, director of the Pérez Museum in Miami, who has organized several exhibitions about the artist, he is “a genius of our time.”
“I would say that he is one of the most famous artists on the planet. His works are not only unique examples of art, but also have the ability to translate the problems and concerns of the time in a modern sense, in a very deep historical sense,” Mr. Sirmans told BBC Mundo in an interview. .
Basquiat was both personally and artistically irreverent, creating a style outside of any paradigm, with a great desire for recognition, and admired stars like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, who died of an overdose at the age of 27. .
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Jean-Michel Basquiat died in 1988 at the age of only 27, but left behind a huge body of work that today sells for millions of dollars.
Jean-Michel Basquiat began to draw on sheets of paper that his father Gerard, an accountant, brought from the office. His painter mother constantly took him to see exhibits at places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Brooklyn Museum.
Undoubtedly, it was his mother who encouraged him to pursue an artistic career. For example, in 1969, Basquiat was hit by a car and suffered several broken bones. While in the hospital, he gave her a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, which would become the inspiration for her later anatomical drawings.
In an interview in 1986, the artist himself said about Matilde Andradas: “My mother gave me all the elementary things. Art comes from her.”
But after his parents’ divorce and several moves, including a brief stint in Puerto Rico, Basquiat became a rebellious youth who constantly ran away from home. And at 17, he was kicked out of the City-As-School alternative school in New York for bad behavior.
There he met classmate Al Diaz and started a graffiti project with him called SAMO.
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“The Goat” is a Basquiat coin from Sotheby’s valued at US$7-9 million (between 4,322,738,300 and 5,556,626,800 CFA francs) in 2017.
SAMO was mainly conceptual art, with two artists writing philosophical poems on the walls of New York City.
“He didn’t have a gallery, so he built subways and walls next to art galleries in Soho and lower Manhattan,” says Sirmans.
Basquiat’s fame in the art world began after The Village Voice reviewed SAMO’s work in 1978, although the concept would die a year later.
However, the artist began a meteoric solo career after being invited to participate in the Time Square Show (1980), a prestigious group exhibition organized and curated by the same artists who exhibited there, including Keith Haring and Jenny Holzer. ..
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The crown “Untitled” contains the crown, one of the most repeated symbols of the artist in his works.
By 1981, he was having solo exhibitions and his works were selling for thousands of US dollars. At the age of 24, Basquiat’s works are in the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art and are acquired by major collectors. They have also traveled to places as diverse as the Ivory Coast and Germany.
“I think his work is very popular all over the world because he speaks for different classes…” Sirmans tells BBC Mundo.
His art, which includes hundreds of paintings, graphics and object interventions, is marked by urban elements and loaded with recurring symbols such as skulls or crowns, which historians have given many meanings to, and are now part of popular culture.
Relationship with Warhol and the price of fame
Basquiat’s works appear on other artists’ works, on t-shirts, on various objects, and even in films. It is also referenced in songs by contemporary artists such as Jay-Z’s “BBC” and Kanye West’s “That’s My Bitch”.
Critics of the time describe not only Basquiat’s great talent and the great sales of his work, but also that the young artist frequented the most exclusive parties and cocktail parties in New York, VIPs.
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In 1980s New York, Basquiat and Warhol were part of a select group that constantly attended parties and cocktail parties. Basquiat is here with supermodel Tina Chow.
He was, for example, Madonna’s partner in 1982, when the singer was just beginning her meteoric career.
At the age of 17, he met and became friends with the man he knew: Andy Warhol. The two men admired each other. Each influenced the work of the other. In 1985, they held a major joint exhibition marking Warhol’s return to painting after years of experimenting with other art forms.
“Jean-Michel made me paint differently, which is a good thing,” Warhol wrote in his diary in 1984.
However, the collaboration received strong negative reviews in the press, which affected their relationship and led to their separation.
But a 1988 New York Times article notes that Warhol was one of Basquiat’s most vocal advisors about his drug addiction, a problem that affected his career.
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“Hollywood Africans” is a work created by Basquiat in 1983.
In the same article, Basquiat was described as a prodigy who was also distracted by the weight of fame and constantly “behaving flawlessly.”
The truth is that he also had to contend with the complex art world of his time, becoming one of the rare blacks to achieve such “success”. Some claim that art dealers offered him drugs in exchange for his paintings, and he was even described as Andy Warhol’s “pet” in a magazine.
“He was a precocious genius, creating for a world that didn’t necessarily understand him,” says Sirmans.
On August 12, 1988, after several attempts to recover from his addiction, Basquiat was found dead at 54 Great Jones Street in New York City. He was only 27 years old and that’s how his legend began.
