Jean-Michel Basquiat
1960–1988American · Late 20th Century & Contemporary 1960–present
He went from spray-painting cryptic aphorisms on Lower Manhattan walls to the most expensive American painting ever sold, in about eight years, and died at twenty-seven.
Formation
Born in Brooklyn to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, and largely self-taught as a painter. He was fluent in three languages and had absorbed anatomy from a copy of Gray's Anatomy given to him after a childhood car accident, which supplies the recurring skeletal and organ imagery. From 1976 he and Al Diaz wrote under the tag SAMO on downtown buildings. He moved to canvas around 1980, showed in the Times Square Show, and was internationally famous within three years. He collaborated with Warhol, and died of a heroin overdose in 1988.
Technique
Layered, fast and deliberately unresolved. Basquiat worked on canvas, wood, doors and found supports with oilstick, acrylic, spray paint, collaged photocopies and pencil, often several at once, and painted with the television on and the studio full of people. Words are central: he wrote, crossed out and rewrote text across the surface, and said he crossed words out so that people would want to read them more. The drawing is rapid and diagrammatic, faces are masks and crowns recur as a signature device.
The palette
Loud, high-contrast and unmixed. Cadmium reds and yellows, hard blues and greens straight from the tube, black oilstick over everything, with white used to scrub out and reveal in turn. Colour is applied in flat unblended areas that fight each other, and the surface stays busy — nothing recedes, everything is at the front. The effect owes as much to the street and to printed matter as to painting.
Legacy
He is the pivotal figure in the movement of graffiti-derived practice into the gallery system, and one of very few Black artists to achieve that level of recognition in the 1980s New York art world — a context his work addresses directly, repeatedly and critically. The market that followed his death has been extraordinary, and the 2017 sale of Untitled for $110.5 million reset expectations for post-war American art.
Further reading: Basquiat (Taschen Basic Art) — Leonhard EmmerlingPalette
The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each.
Pigments used: Cadmium yellow · Titanium white · Cadmium red · Cobalt blue · Ochre · Sienna