Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement.
104 Facts About Jean-Michel Basquiat
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At 21, Jean-Michel Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever take part in Documenta in Kassel, Germany.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat's art focused on dichotomies such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat appropriated poetry, drawing, and painting, and married text and image, abstraction, figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat 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.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat's father was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and his mother was born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat was a precocious child who learned to read and write by the age of four.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat's mother encouraged her son's artistic talent and he often tried to draw his favorite cartoons.
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In 1968, Jean-Michel Basquiat was hit by a car while playing in the street at the age of seven.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat's arm was broken and he suffered several internal injuries, which required a splenectomy.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat's mother was committed to a psychiatric hospital when he was ten and thereafter spent her life in and out of institutions.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat's family resided in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Boerum Hill and then in 1974, moved to Miramar, Puerto Rico.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat struggled to deal with his mother's instability and rebelled as a teenager.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat ran away from home at 15 when his father caught him smoking pot in his room.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat slept on park benches at Washington Square Park and took acid.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat would skip school with his friends, but still received encouragement from his teachers, and began to write and illustrate for the school newspaper.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat developed the character SAMO to endorse a faux religion.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat worked for the Unique Clothing Warehouse in NoHo while continuing to create graffiti at night.
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In 1979, Jean-Michel Basquiat appeared on the live public-access television show TV Party hosted by Glenn O'Brien.
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Around this time, Jean-Michel Basquiat lived in the East Village with his friend Alexis Adler, a Barnard biology graduate.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat often copied diagrams of chemical compounds borrowed from Adler's science textbooks.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat documented Basquiat's creative explorations as he transformed the floors, walls, doors and furniture into his artworks.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat sold Warhol a postcard titled Stupid Games, Bad Ideas.
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In October 1979, at Arleen Schloss's open space called A's, Jean-Michel Basquiat showed his SAMO montages using color Xerox copies of his works.
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In June 1980, Jean-Michel Basquiat participated in The Times Square Show, a multi-artist exhibition sponsored by Collaborative Projects Incorporated and Fashion Moda.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat was noticed by various critics and curators, including Jeffrey Deitch, who mentioned him in an article titled "Report from Times Square" in the September 1980 issue of Art in America.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat sold his first painting, Cadillac Moon, to Debbie Harry, lead singer of the punk rock band Blondie, for $200 after they had filmed Downtown 81 together.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat appeared as a disc jockey in the 1981 Blondie music video "Rapture", a role originally intended for Grandmaster Flash.
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At the time, Jean-Michel Basquiat was living with his girlfriend, Suzanne Mallouk, who financially supported him as a waitress.
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In September 1981, art dealer Annina Nosei invited Jean-Michel Basquiat to join her gallery at the suggestion of Sandro Chia.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat provided him with materials and a space to work in the basement of her gallery.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat had his first American one-man show at the Annina Nosei Gallery in March 1982.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat painted in Modena for his second Italian exhibition in March 1982.
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In June 1982, at 21, Jean-Michel Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever take part in Documenta in Kassel, Germany.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat's works were exhibited alongside Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat was photographed by James Van Der Zee for an interview with Henry Geldzahler published in the January 1983 issue of Warhol's Interview magazine.
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In early December 1982, Jean-Michel Basquiat began working at the studio space art dealer Larry Gagosian had built below his Venice, California home.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat was accompanied by his girlfriend, then-unknown singer Madonna.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat was making paintings, I was selling them, and we were having a lot of fun.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat visited him on several occasions and found inspiration in his accomplishments.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat created the cover art for the single, making it highly desirable among both record and art collectors.
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In March 1983, at 22 years old, Jean-Michel Basquiat became one of the youngest artists to participate in the Whitney Biennial exhibition of contemporary art.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat painted Defacement in response to the incident.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat participated in a Christmas benefit with various New York artists for the family of Michael Stewart in 1983.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat often painted in expensive Armani suits and would appear in public in the same paint-splattered clothes.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat was a regular at the Area nightclub, where he sometimes worked the turntables as a DJ for fun.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat painted murals for the Palladium nightclub in New York City.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat's swift rise to fame was covered in the media.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat appeared on the cover of the February 10,1985, issue of The New York Times Magazine in a feature titled "New Art, New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist".
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Jean-Michel Basquiat's work appeared in GQ and Esquire, and he was interviewed for MTV's "Art Break" segment.
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For what would be his last exhibition on the West Coast, Jean-Michel Basquiat returned to Los Angeles for his show at the Gagosian Gallery in January 1986.
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In February 1986, Jean-Michel Basquiat traveled to Atlanta, Georgia for an exhibition of his drawings at Fay Gold Gallery.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat was invited to walk the runway for Rei Kawakubo again, this time at the Comme des Garcons Homme Plus fashion show in Paris.
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In October 1986, Jean-Michel Basquiat flew to Ivory Coast for an exhibition of his work organized by Bruno Bischofberger at the French Cultural Institute in Abidjan.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat was accompanied by his girlfriend Jennifer Goode, who worked at his frequent hangout, Area nightclub.
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In November 1986, at 25 years old, Jean-Michel Basquiat became the youngest artist given an exhibition at Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover, Germany.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat's continued drug use is thought to have been a way of coping after the death of his friend Andy Warhol in February 1987.
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In 1987, Jean-Michel Basquiat had exhibitions at Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris, the Akira Ikeda Gallery in Tokyo, and the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat designed a Ferris wheel for Andre Heller's Luna Luna, an ephemeral amusement park in Hamburg from June to August 1987 with rides designed by renowned contemporary artists.
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In January 1988, Jean-Michel Basquiat traveled to Paris for his exhibition at the Yvon Lambert Gallery and to Dusseldorf for an exhibition at the Hans Mayer Gallery.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat had been found unresponsive in his bedroom by his girlfriend Kelle Inman and was taken to Cabrini Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat's canon revolves around single heroic figures: athletes, prophets, warriors, cops, musicians, kings and the artist himself.
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Art critic Franklin Sirmans analyzed that Jean-Michel Basquiat appropriated poetry, drawing, and painting, and married text and image, abstraction, figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat explored artistic legacies from wide sources, including an interrogation of the Classical tradition.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat often drew on random objects and surfaces, including other people's clothing.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat's paintings are typically covered with codes of all kinds: words, letters, numerals, pictograms, logos, map symbols, and diagrams.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat drew constantly and often used objects around him as surfaces when paper was not immediately at hand.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat drew in many different media, most commonly ink, pencil, felt-tip or marker, and oil-stick.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat sometimes used Xerox copies of fragments of his drawings to paste onto the canvases of larger paintings.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat immortalized Ricard in two drawings, Untitled and Rene Ricard.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat was particularly a fan of bebop and cited saxophonist Charlie Parker as a hero.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat frequently referenced Parker and other jazz musicians in paintings such as Charles the First and Horn Players, and King Zulu.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat often incorporated Spanish words into his artworks like Untitled and Sabado por la Noche.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat has various works deriving from African-American history, namely Slave Auction, Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta, El Gran Espectaculo, and Jim Crow.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat sought to portray that African-Americans have become complicit with the "institutionalized forms of whiteness and corrupt white regimes of power" years after the Jim Crow era had ended.
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One or two words on a Jean-Michel Basquiat contain the entire history of graffiti.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat has a perfect idea of what he's getting across, using everything that collates to his vision.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat speaks articulately while dodging the full impact of clarity like a matador.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat attributed the Basquiat phenomenon to be a mixture of hype, overproduction, and a greedy art market.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat's work was showcased at Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover in 1987 and 1989.
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In March 2005, the retrospective Jean-Michel Basquiat was mounted by the Brooklyn Museum in New York.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat sold his first painting to singer Debbie Harry for $200 in 1981.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat's rise to fame in the international art market landed him on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in 1985, which was unprecedented for a young African-American artist.
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In 2007, Jean-Michel Basquiat's painting Hannibal was seized by federal authorities as part of an embezzlement scheme by convicted Brazilian money launderer and former banker Edemar Cid Ferreira.
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Between 2007 and 2012, the price of Jean-Michel Basquiat's work continued to steadily increase up to $16.3 million.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat sold the painting for $85 million at Phillips in 2022.
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In March 2021, Jean-Michel Basquiat's Warrior sold for $41.8 million at Christie's in Hong Kong, which is the most expensive Western work of art sold at auction in Asia.
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The authentication committee of the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat was formed by the Robert Miller Gallery, the gallery that was assigned to handle Basquiat's estate after his death, in part to wage battle against the growing number of fakes and forgeries in the Basquiat market.
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Art critic Rene Ricard, who helped launch Jean-Michel Basquiat's career, said that Jean-Michel Basquiat was into everything and had "turned tricks" in Condado when he lived in Puerto Rico.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat was attracted to people for all different reasons.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat was attracted to intelligence more than anything and to pain.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat was very attracted to people who silently bore some sort of inner pain as he did, and he loved people who were one of a kind, people who had a unique vision of things.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat's estate was administered by his father, Gerard Jean-Michel Basquiat, until his passing in 2013.
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In 2015, Jean-Michel Basquiat was featured on the cover of Vanity Fair's Art and Artists Special Edition.
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In 2017, Jean-Michel Basquiat was posthumously awarded the key to the city of Brooklyn by Borough President Eric Adams and honored on the Celebrity Path at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
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The first mural depicts Jean-Michel Basquiat's painting Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump being searched by two police officers.
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In 2007, Jean-Michel Basquiat was listed among GQ's 50 Most Stylish Men of the Past 50 Years.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat often painted in expensive Armani suits and he did a photo shoot for Issey Miyake.
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In 2015, Jean-Michel Basquiat was featured on the cover of T: The New York Times Style Magazine Men's Style issue.
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Apparel and accessories companies that have featured Jean-Michel Basquiat's work include Uniqlo, Urban Outfitters, Supreme, Herschel Supply Co.
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Sara Driver directed the documentary film Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat, which premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival.
102.
Jean-Michel Basquiat published a "remix" of the book in 2005.
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The children's book Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, written and illustrated by Javaka Steptoe, was released in 2016.
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In 2020, New York rock band the Strokes used Jean-Michel Basquiat's painting Bird on Money as the cover art for their album The New Abnormal.