Jean Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat (New York, December 22, 1960-ibidem, August 12, 1988) also known as SAMO, was an American artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent.

Biography

Early Years

Jean-Michel Basquiat was the first of three children born to Matilde Andrades and Gerard Basquiat. He had two sisters, Lisane, born in 1964, and Jeanine, born in 1967. His father was a Haitian accountant of respectable solvency economical and her mother a Puerto Rican graphic designer of great prestige in her profession. Jean-Michel grew up in a torn family environment, his parents divorced and because of this situation he had to change schools many times. He studied in a private Catholic school, later in a public school and finally, at the age of 16, he entered the City-As-School, a school for gifted adolescents, from where he was expelled, for rebellion, a year before graduating.

In his youth he came into contact with the subculture of the big city, related to drug use and street gangs. In 1977, together with Al Díaz, he entered the world of graffiti, painting on subway cars and in the areas of SoHo, a New York neighborhood where art galleries proliferate.

The following year he dropped out of school one year short of graduating high school and left home to live for two years on the streets, in abandoned buildings or with his friends in Lower Manhattan, surviving by selling postcards and T-shirts which he himself decorated. He continued to dedicate himself to graffiti, his paintings and writings had a lot of poetic and philosophical charge, but above all satirical. The pseudonym of his alter ego shared with Al Díaz was SAMO (acronym for SAMe Old shit, that is, "the same old shit", & #34;the same crap"), with which both signed their tags and graffiti with cryptic messages. The use of this name was decisive in his life.

These murals bore inscriptions such as “SAMO saves idiots” or “SAMO puts an end to religious brainwashing, nothingness politics, and false philosophy.” An article on SAMO's street writing published in The Village Voice was the first indication that the art world was interested in him.

Personal Life

The artist had several relationships that influenced his work, one of the most significant being with the artist Andy Warhol.

Likewise, on the sentimental issue, he was related to several women, one of the best known currently was Madonna. Lower Manhattan was the area where they lived at that time, it was in 1982 when they began to spend more time together and go out to parties in galleries. A theme that united them, she mentions in an interview "she was a big fan of Miles Davis and Charlie Parker".

Death

In 1988 exhibitions were installed in Paris and New York, and in April of that same year he tried to give up his addictions and retired to his home in Hawaii. He returns to New York in June, announcing that he has freed himself from addiction, but on August 12, 1988, at the age of 27, he dies of a heroin overdose, making him the most successful visual artist in the history of Afro-descendant art. He is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn.

Throughout his brief but intense artistic career, he would hold more than 40 personal exhibitions and participate in around 100 collective ones. Self-promotion and publicity claims were priority factors for Basquiat, as they had previously been for Andy Warhol or Julian Schnabel.

Neo-expressionism gradually prevailed over appropriationism, partly thanks to the economic boom that raised the price of art and, especially, painting, to high levels, and partly thanks to the support of gallery owners and collectors. The critics, however, were not unanimous in their assessment, and the complaint about the lack of theoretical basis of the neo-expressionist discourse was common. It was stated that the art practiced by the neo-expressionists lacked any political or social meaning, it was just merchandise and, therefore, subject to the ups and downs and fluctuations of the market. Neo-expressionist painting was reduced to a consumer product and, as such, to a fact that was creatively disqualified and vulgar.

Thought

Graffiti

Since the late 1960s, groups of young people from the slums of Brooklyn and the Bronx began covering the walls of public spaces (walls, billboards, platforms, tunnels, and subway cars) with scribbles and graffiti.. Those closest to the love generation used these public spaces to vent their disenchantment, their protests, their disagreements with the social, political and economic structures of a system that was absolutely adverse. Others, fleeing their ghettos, left their footprints or anonymous marks on urban walls with depoliticized attitudes and indifferent to the establishment, with the sole desire to affirm their identity and testify to their existence within of a system that kept them apart.

In 1979 he wrote on the walls of SoHo: SAMO is dead. So, he hung up the graffiti, and founded the Gray, a musical group in which he played the clarinet and synthesizer and with which he frequented pubs such as CBGB and the Mudd Club, fashionable places where other artists, but soon abandoned his fledgling musical career. In the East Village, musicians and artists created their own subculture (hip hop), shared their love of rock music, break and rap, and carried out performances, underground films, and graffiti.

Pictorial activity

But it was from 1980, when he was still a drifter, that he began to dedicate himself mainly to painting. J.M. Basquiat possessed a certain intellectual curiosity and was genuinely fascinated by Abstract Expressionism, by the gestural strokes of Franz Kline, by the early work of Jackson Pollock, by the figure paintings of De Kooning and the calligraphy of Cy Twombly, all which, together with his Haitian and Puerto Rican roots, led him to have a great mastery of expressively gestural graphics. Also interested in the combine paintings of Robert Rauschenberg and in Art Brut, by Jean Dubuffet, as well as in popular culture, his graffiti acquired a plastic and expressive quality that was increasingly closer to that of recent art. American painting, to the point that, a few years later, Jeffrey Deitch defined his work as a "shocking combination of the art of De Kooning and the doodles spray-painted in the New York subway."

Since he was a child, he had received an appreciable informal artistic education; his mother took him to visit museums (he was a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum at age six), she also introduced him to reading poetic literature, and later encouraged him to write his own. The name of his group became another chapter in the myth when Basquiat stated that he was inspired by the author of a book on anatomy that had accompanied his convalescence after being hit by a car at the age of six. Basquiat himself would repeat several times that this book was an early reference to his work. He completed his self-taught training as an auditor at the School of Visual Arts, where he came into contact with the painter and graffiti artist Keith Haring.

Work

Three stages can be distinguished in Basquiat's short but intense pictorial activity:

1. From 1980 to 1982, epoch at which the sanitary graffiti blends with street visions and symbolic forms of primitive cultural traditions, such as masks, skeletons and skulls.
2. From 1982 to 1985, with populated works of words-concepts, voodoo images, totemicas y arcaizadors, portraits-homenajes to black heroes - jazz musicians, writers, basketball players, boxers- and references to the American consumer society.
3. 1986-1988, period with increasingly sophisticated paintings in its contents and its complex pictorial figuration, resolved this with multiple and fragmentary quotations from primitive or ancient cultures (African, Aztec, Egyptian, Grecorromean, etc.), but also from the European pictorial tradition.

As he himself stated on more than one occasion, his work was closer to painting, a painting halfway between gestural and warm abstraction and post-pop figuration than to graffiti (“My work It has nothing to do with graffiti. It's part of painting. I've always painted.").

Buyers

Critic Robert Hughes in a review commented that Basquiat's first art dealer: “kept him locked in the basement of her gallery painting pictures (now labeled 'early Basquiats', to distinguish them from the less appreciated 'late Basquiats') ”, painted three years later) which she sold before they were dry, and sometimes before they were finished.” Hughes maintained that Basquiat never had much luck with his managers: “his public relations officer was Henry Geldzhaler, who had previously unsuccessful as a writer, museum curator, and historian, but still had considerable influence as an informant, at least among new collectors."

Nossei was followed by Tony Shafrazi, who before becoming a gallery owner specializing in graffiti-art, had committed an act of vandalism against Pablo Picasso's Guernica, when it was on display at the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MOMA). Later, the relentless Mary Boone took charge of her works, quite a celebrity within the New York art circuit for her firm hand in managing her artists.

Works

• Cráneo1981. Acrylic and oil crayon on fabric.
• Red man1981. Acrylic, pastel and spray paint on fabric.
• Dangerous water1981.
• Rice with chickenoo1981. Acrylic and oil crayon on fabric.
• Bird on money, 1981.
• Irony of the negro policeman, 1981.
• Ashes1981. Acrylic, oil crayon and spray paint on wood.
• Fishing1981. Acrylic and crayon on fabric.
• Angel down1981, Acrylic and Oil Crayon on canvas.
• Benefit I1982. Acrylic on fabric.
• Holy1982. Acrylic and oil on fabric.
• Boxer, 1982.
• Mecca1982. Acrylic and oil crayon.
• Number1982. Acrylic, oil, oil crayon, marker and collage on fabric.
• Invalid heads1982. Acrylic and oil crayon on fabric.
• Self-portrait as a heelPart II, 1982. Acrylic and oil crayon on fabric.
• Authorport1982. Acrylic, oil crayon and spray paint on fabric.
• Dutch settlers (part I)1982. Acrylic on fabric.
• Dutch settlers (part II)1982. Acrylic on fabric.
• Dutch settlers (part III)1982. Acrylic on fabric.
• tar and feathers1982. Acrylic, oil crayon, spray paint, tar and feathers on masonite.
• Hollywood Africans1983. Acrylic and oil crayon on fabric.
• Young Moses1983. Acrylic and oil crayon on fabric.
• Bird as Buddha1984. Acrylic and oil on fabric.
• Tobacco1984. Acrylic and oil crayon on fabric.
• PZ1984. Acrylic and collage on fabric.
• Now is the time1985. Acrylic and oil crayon on fabric.
• Sienna1984. Acrylic, oil crayon and silkscreen on fabric.
• Earth1984. Acrylic on fabric.
• He came from Babylon1984 Oil, acrylic and oil crayon on canvas.
• Arm and hammer1985 (worked together with Andy Warhol), Acrylic on canvas.
• Now is the time1985. Acrylic on wood.
• Untitled, 1981,
• King Zulu1986. Acrylic, wax and marker on fabric.
• 1988, Christian Community (European inspiration, the "Tour Eiffel" appears). Acrylic paint and oil bar on fabric.

Exhibitions

Her first participation in an art exhibition was in 1980 at the Times Square Show, a kind of alternative art and fashion gallery presented in an abandoned warehouse in the Bronx. In a certain way, it was the first time that the expression of graffiti art ceased to be exclusively a marginal manifestation, since a series of artists, initially unrelated to the mainstream system, that is, curator/museum/ critic, exhibited their works in the exhibition. It was organized by the collective “Colab” (Collaborative Projects Inc.), and in it the different professional artists and graffiti artists were presented anonymously and indiscriminately, all mixed together (there were no names of authors or labels with the titles of the works).

Basquiat exhibited a mural where he collected some SAMO graffiti. And despite the bad reviews that described the exhibition as something raw, irreverent, rebellious, an example of bad taste and lacking any hint of artisticity, from then on graffiti artists were progressively recognized and integrated into the art system. Some Soho galleries, such as White Columns and Fashion Moda, gave up their spaces so that graffiti artists could eventually hang their works.

In 1981, Basquiat exhibited his works at P.S.1 of the Institute of Art and Urban Resources in New York, in an exhibition titled New York/New Wave (New York/New Wave ). An attempt was made to decree that this show was made up of a stellar group of the emerging artistic jetset. The star artist was photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and, as with each of the latter's public appearances, the exhibition was painstakingly staged and produced positive results. This had a favorable impact on Basquiat, since, along with the photographs, the strong works, with rough gestures and colors as simple as forceful, were shown by the young artist, who attended the exhibition saturated with cocaine, which would make a large part of the audience uncomfortable. concurrent. It was here that he met Andy Warhol, with whom he would have a long friendship and professional collaboration.

In December 1981, the first important article “The Radian Child” by René Ricard appeared in Artforum (nº 24, pp. 24-43), considered the most important art magazine of the time. That same year (1981) his graffiti was exhibited at Documenta in Kassel. His passion for music was such that in the most intense period of his career, in the midst of important exhibitions such as Transvanguardia Italy / America and Dokumenta in Kassel, he began to produce rap music and DJ in clubs. of manhattan. His favorite musicians: Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Billie Holiday, among others, appear in his paintings from that time.

Solo exhibitions

In 1982 Basquiat began a true path to success: his individual and collective exhibitions multiplied. In 1982 he is included in the exhibition Transvanguardia: Italy / America with neo-expressionist artists such as S. Chia, F. Clemente, E. Cucchi, D. Deutsch, D. Salle and Julian Schnabel. That same year he participated in the exhibition organized by Diego Cortez, presented at the Marlborough Gallery in New York, entitled The Pressure to Paint, together with other artists such as G. Baselitz, S. Chia, F. Clemente, E. Cucchi, M. Disler, R. Fetting, K. Haring, and J. Schnabel, among others. The following year (1983) he participated in the Biennial of the Whitney Museum in New York together with the emerging representatives of appropriation art, the new expressionists, and other graffiti artists such as K. Haring.

That same year (1983) the exhibition Post-Graffiti, prepared by the prestigious gallery owner Sidney Janis and presented in the gallery that bears his name -the Sidney Janis Gallery- confronted the work of those artists who had already fully integrated into the system with that of the “ghetto artists”. Of course, Jean-Michel Basquiat appeared alongside the first as the main highlight among others like Haring or Scharf. In 1983, he participated in solo shows at prestigious New York galleries such as Gagosian and Annina Nosei. In 1984, the Museum of Modern Art in the same city (New York), which had initially been reluctant to neo-expressionism, presented the important exhibition An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture, where, together with to a selection of one hundred and seventy artists, Basquiat also participated.

In 1984 Warhol introduced him to the Swiss gallery owner Bruno Bischofberger, who made his work known in Europe and with whom he collaborated closely until his death. Since this year, Basquiat's friends begin to worry about his addictions. He was often found near comatose and very paranoid with thoughts of persecution. Basquiat's paranoia, however, was motivated by very real threats from people stealing paintings from his studio or gallery owners taking unfinished works to exhibit or sell.

At this time Basquiat, among a few others, came to use the coated paper pages of general information and fashion magazines, such as Time, Newsweek, Vanity Fair and Vogue not for his painting, but for his life in “high society” and for his presence at parties and in fashionable clubs, such as the New York Palladium. At that time he frequented Madonna and other entertainment and music stars. On February 10, 1985, Basquiat appeared on the cover of The New York Times Sunday magazine, becoming the first black plastic artist to appear on the front page. Which is curious, because at that time the white racist stereotype considered blacks to be good athletes, good dancers or good musicians, but not in fields such as the plastic arts. The article that accompanies the photo, written by Cathleen McGuigan, is titled "New art, new money: The marketing of American artist."

In March of that year, 1984, a new individual exhibition at the Mary Boone Gallery, another of the most important of the moment. Robert Farris Thomson, in the catalog for that exhibition, defines Basquiat's art as part of an "Afro-Atlantic tradition" and it is cataloged in that context. In 1985 Basquiat collaborated with Francesco Clemente and Andy Warhol, although the works produced did not arouse a positive response from critics. The result of this collaboration is several large canvases with suggestive color combinations, collages that combine painting, serigraphy, graffiti and advertising language. Between 1984 and 1985 the canvases traveled from one studio to another; usually Warhol started them, Clemente perfected them, and Basquiat finished them off. However, Warhol and Basquiat got along particularly well. Warhol wrote in his diary: “Jean-Michel Basquiat has made me paint in a very different way, and that is very good”. The idea of painting together was considered enriching for both because Warhol, who at that time only used techniques such as screen printing, picked up the brush again, and Basquiat began to learn the mechanical techniques applied to painting. The black cultural establishment would criticize Warhol's patronage of a black artist.

In 1986, Basquiat traveled to Africa and exhibited in Abidjan (Ivory Coast). In November of the same year, he held a large exhibition (more than 80 works) at the Kestner-Gesellschaft Museum in Hannover, becoming, at the age of 25, the youngest artist to exhibit in that museum.

Legacy

Its importance in art history

His concern to convey in his painting the problem of double belonging to ethnic minorities, Afro-descendant and Latino, although it is a recurring element of his pictorial narrative, he never submitted to conditioning message intentions. British critic Edward Lucie Smith argues: "The most celebrated black artist of the 1980s, Jean-Michel Basquiat, makes frequent use of 'black' imagery, but at the same time always demonstrates his eagerness to subdue it. to clear accents of universality”. He also points out that "his intention was not so much to build another little chapel for African-American culture, but to compete on an equal footing with his mentor Andy Warhol." For his part, the German theorist Klaus Honnef affirms: “Whether by chance or not, if one ignores the significant allusions to the social existence of blacks in the United States and the considerable fury of his paintings, one could reach the conclusion that Basquiat's paintings and drawings are rooted in French aesthetics, not New York graffiti."

For his part, Irving Sandler maintains that Basquiat, who from 1980 until his death achieved unusual success and notoriety, just as his “godfather” Andy Warhol had done a few years earlier, became the prototype of romantic genius, attractive, rebellious, hip and wild and, at the same time, the professional eager for celebrity and money, the last of the stars of Andy Warhol's glittering universe.

The legend of the wild child, after his death, will be touched and retouched until making the distinction between reality and fiction almost impossible. For example, the desire to be the first to discover, perhaps invent, the new pictorial genius of the decade, transforms Diego Cortez into an impromptu and inspired promoter of the mythical story of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Cortez praises his primitivism, the almost archaic purity, the expressive vigor and several other clichés of the foreseeable repertoire when it comes to African-American artists, especially with graffiti.

The manager, art critic and poet René Ricard predicts: “I will make a star of you.” And he prophesies: "No one will want to be part of a generation that ignores another van Gogh." The artist has some traits, which we have already mentioned, that constitute an excellent platform when it comes to letting exuberant imaginations take off: young, poor (at least for a few years and by choice), black and of Latino descent, presumably linked to the world of gangs, with a recent past as a frenetic and rebellious graffiti artist, coming from an unnamed and pathetic area of Brooklyn.

The market will raise its name as a proudly anti-intellectual contrast to Keith Haring, a post-pop artist with graffiti roots, albeit with a solid artistic background. Basquiat only briefly passed through a few art schools, conduct several times praised as a virtue.

His early death will mark the definitive consecration of the myth. Somehow Basquiat decided the shortness of his life. "I know that one day I'm going to turn the corner and I'm going to be prepared for that," he said one of the few times he spoke about himself, about his existence. "That" was a death sought since adolescence, an idea that he somehow never abandoned, through an obsessively self-destructive character. “I never know too well if I'm alive. It doesn't worry me too much anyway: I think I'm immortal, ”he said to one of his partners, Jennifer Goode. The idea of his immortality reappeared as a pretext every time a paternal Warhol reproached him for drug abuse: "Don't worry, I'm immortal."

Chicano artist Benny Dalmau and Italian avant-garde artist Francesco Clemente agree that it was only when Basquiat was painting that he seemed animated by an irrepressible and unexpected vitality.

The Legend

The legend continued to grow, now supported by the vigilance of a market that found an excellent and fruitful product. Ricard, once again, takes up a 1981 prophecy and proclaims: "We have found the radiant child of the century." He compares it, after the European acceptance, with Rimbaud.

His followers affirm that in his works an intuitive sensitivity shines that surely would have curdled in formidable talent, the primary beginnings of a tremendously rare gift shine: genius. The strength, the lyricism, the melancholy, the violence, the playful grace, the chromatic ease, the unpredictable fusions are there, as testimonies that always communicate the sensation of unfinished fermentality. There is also the singularized and subtle appropriation of Rauschenberg, of Jasper Johns. Above all, the "savagery" of the graphics-texts used by his admired Cy Twombly. What in Twombly is lightness and refinement in Basquiat becomes exasperated gestures, cartographies of an affectivity in perpetual and nonconforming bewilderment.

In 2015, a Basquiat work valued at more than $11 million was stolen, and two years later, Japanese businessman Yusaku Maezawa bought a work of his at auction for $110.5 million to exhibit at Contemporary Art Foundation that he himself chairs.

Cinema

In 1996 the life of Jean-Michel Basquiat was brought to the big screen, after 6 years of filming, by the hand of his friend and colleague Julian Schnabel. Singer David Bowie played Andy Warhol.

In the year 2000, the film Downtown 81 is made, directed by the director and photographer Edo Bertoglio, where the artist is located at the age of 19 in New York City before his fame.