Basquiat went from spray-painted riddles to Documenta's youngest artist in four years
In May 1978 a Brooklyn teenager and a friend began tagging Lower Manhattan walls with cryptic slogans signed SAMO. By June 1982, aged 21, Jean-Michel Basquiat was exhibiting in Kassel beside Beuys and Warhol, the youngest artist ever invited to Documenta. He died at 27; one of his skulls later fetched $110.5 million.
A Park Slope child, Basquiat arrived on December 22, 1960, the son of a Haitian-born father, Gérard, and Matilde, a Brooklyn native of Puerto Rican descent. Matilde took him to museums and made him a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum. At seven he was struck by a car; while he recovered from surgery that removed his spleen, she gave him a copy of Gray's Anatomy, a book whose diagrams stayed with him. His parents separated that year and his father raised the children.
Adolescence was rough. The family spent 1974 to 1976 in Puerto Rico, and back in Brooklyn he ran away at 15, sleeping in Washington Square Park. While enrolled at City-As-School, a Manhattan school for students who struggled in ordinary classrooms, he and Al Diaz turned a private joke into SAMO, a mock religion whose deadpan epigrams soon covered SoHo and the Lower East Side. He was expelled in June 1978 for pushing a pie into the principal's face, and when the partnership soured in 1980 he wrote SAMO IS DEAD across the neighbourhood.
The downtown scene opened doors. He appeared regularly on Glenn O'Brien's public-access programme TV Party, played in the noise band Gray, sold his first painting to Blondie's Debbie Harry for $200 and turned up as a DJ in the band's video for Rapture. The Times Square Show in June 1980 caught the eye of the critic Jeffrey Deitch. Dealer Annina Nosei gave him a basement studio in 1981, and Bruno Bischofberger became his worldwide representative the following summer.
His canvases set wealth against poverty and integration against segregation, mixing words, figures, history and pointed commentary on his experience as a Black artist. He died of a heroin overdose in 1988. In 2017 an untitled 1982 painting of a black skull streaked with red and yellow sold for $110.5 million, placing it among the priciest pictures ever bought.
Source: Jean-Michel Basquiat
