Jean-Michel Basquiat

The U.S. painter and draftsman Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in New York on December 22, 1960. His mother comes from Puerto Rico, his father from Haiti. His love of art was awakened in him early on by his mother, who drew and painted herself and visited museums with the boy. He was able to read by the age of four, attended a private Catholic school and, by the age of eleven, was fluent in French and Spanish. After his parents separate and his mother becomes physically ill, Jean-Michel Basquiat lives with his father in Puerto Rico from 1974-1976. But it is a difficult father-son relationship. Back in New York, Jean-Michel Basquiat attends the City-As-School, a free high school for particularly gifted young people, starting in 1976. At the end of the 1970s, Basquiat immerses himself in New York's multifaceted creative New Wave scene. Late 1970s: graffiti with secret SAMO© messages. With his school friend Al Diaz, Jean-Michel Basquiat begins spraying graffiti on the walls of buildings in Soho, preferably of art and cultural institutions, under the pseudonym SAMO© (an abbreviation for "same old shit") in the late 1970s. Their messages soon attract the attention of the New York art scene. In 1979 Basquiat turns to visual art; in 1981 his artworks are shown publicly for the first time in the Times Square Show and he participates with Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe and others in the exhibition "New York/New Wave" at P.S.1 in New York. Through the mediation of art dealer Bruno Bischofsberger, Jean-Michel Basquiat's first solo exhibition in Europe takes place that same year at the Galleria d'Arte Emilio Mazzoli in Modena. Creative frenzy in the 1980s: angry, wild, loud. In 1982 Jean-Michel Basquiat takes part in Documenta 7 in Kassel and, at the age of 21, is the youngest artist ever invited to a Documenta up to that time. On the one hand, his works thrilled the international art world; on the other, his works, dismissed as artless scribbles, met with equal rejection. Jean-Michel Basquiat established new expressive and figurative elements in post-war American art. In a gesturally raw and expressive mix of symbols, line drawings, and words or mere letters in bright, garish colors, Jean-Michel Basquiat creates intense works that shout their message loudly. His paintings are bursting with content, references and references. He collects books, records in the studio, works while the TV is on, hoards source material of all kinds, which he works off in his works. Drug death in 1988 of the internationally celebrated artist. From 1983 Jean-Michel Basquiat has a close friendship with Andy Warhol, from which a mutually extremely inspiring collaboration develops in 1984/85, as well as with the Italian artist Francesco Clemente. The death of Andy Warhol in 1987 threw Jean-Michel Basquiat into a creative crisis that lasted for months. In Jean-Michel Basquiat's furious creative period, which lasted less than a decade from around 1979 until his early death in 1988, he produced a body of work comprising around 1000 paintings and over 2000 drawings. In 1993 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York shows the first retrospective, numerous exhibitions in museums worldwide celebrate Jean-Michael Basquiat posthumously and increase the immense and constantly growing success of his works in the international art market. Several films with him and about him are released posthumously, for example Basquiat plays the leading role in the film "Downtown 81" in 1980, which was not released until 2000. In 1996, the biographical feature film "Basquiat" by artist and director Julian Schnabel is released, starring Jeffrey Wright, David Bowie, Dennis Hopper and Gary Oldman, among others. In 2010, the documentary "Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child" by director Tamra Davis premieres. Jean-Michel Basquiat dies of a drug overdose in New York on August 12, 1988, at the age of only 27.