Jean-Michel Basquiat

SAMO, and three years to fame

Basquiat was born on 22 December 1960 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, to Gérard Basquiat, an accountant from Haiti, and Matilde Andrades, whose parents were Puerto Rican.[1] He read English, French and Spanish, and drew constantly; his mother took him to the Brooklyn Museum. In the late 1970s he and his schoolfriend Al Diaz began spraying cryptic one-line statements on walls around Lower Manhattan[1] — 'Playing Art with Daddy's Money', '9 to 5 Clone' — and signing them SAMO, short for 'same old'.

The tags made him known before any gallery did. In 1980 he showed work in the Times Square Show, an exhibition organized by the artists' groups Colab and Fashion Moda in an empty building near Times Square, and now treated as the founding event of the 1980s downtown scene. In 1981 the critic and poet René Ricard published 'The Radiant Child' in the art magazine Artforum, an essay largely about Basquiat, and the market arrived. His first solo shows — exhibitions given over to his work alone — came the same year, at the Galleria d'Arte Emilio Mazzoli in Modena in Italy and at the Annina Nosei Gallery in New York.

By 1982 galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Rome, Rotterdam and Zurich were all giving him solo shows, and he was painting the work he is now known for: the skulls, the crowned heads, the boxers, the bebop musicians of 1940s jazz, the griots — the West African praise-singers who carry a community's history in memory — and the copied-out lists. The Broad museum in Los Angeles, which owns twelve of his works, holds two of the best known, Horn Players (1983) and Gold Griot (1984).

Warhol

Andy Warhol was thirty-two years older, the most famous artist in America, and by the early 1980s widely written off as a society portraitist. The Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger, who handled Warhol's work in Europe, introduced the two men in 1982, and from 1984 they painted together in Warhol's studio, one starting a canvas and the other going over it: Warhol's hand-painted logos and headlines under and around Basquiat's figures and words. The Andy Warhol Museum puts the output at 'over 150 collaborative canvases over a four-year period'.

The joint show at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York in 1985 was reviewed badly — the poster had the two of them in boxing gloves, and the notices treated Basquiat as Warhol's mascot — and the friendship coo[2]led. Warhol died on 22 February 1987 after gallbladder surgery. Basquiat's own drug use worsened after it, and he spent much of his last eighteen months alone.

Paris, January 1988

In January 1988 Basquiat flew to Paris for an exhibition of his work at the Galerie Yvon Lambert, then one of the city's leading contemporary galleries, and went on to the German city of Düsseldorf for a show a[3]t the Galerie Hans Mayer. He had shown in Paris before — at the Galerie Daniel Templon, another of the city's leading contemporary dealers, in 1987 — and a second Paris exhibition, at the Galerie Beaubourg, also fell in 1988. In Paris he met the Ivorian painter Ouattara Watts, and the two planned a trip to Watts's home country, Côte d'Ivoire, for that summer.

The trip never happened. After a show at the Vrej Baghoomian Gallery in New York in April, Basquiat went to Maui to get off heroin, came back to New York in July, and died at his Great Jones Street studio on 12 August 1988. He was twenty-seven. The Paris exhibition of January had been the last of his lifetime in the city.

Paris kept showing him afterwards, and quickly: Warhol-Basquiat: Collaborations at Didier Imbert Fine Art in 1989, solo shows at the Galerie Enrico Navarra the same year and at Fabien Boulakia and the Galerie Le Gall Peyroulet in 1990, and a museum exhibition, Peinture, dessin, écriture — 'painting, drawing, writing' — at the Musée-Galerie de la Seita, the Paris exhibition space run by the French state tobacco company, in 1993.

A Basquiat in the French national collection

The Centre Pompidou — France's national museum of modern art, in the 4th arrondissement — holds Slave Auction, painted in 1982: a canvas nearly three metres wide made of crumpled paper collage, oil stick[4] — oil paint bound into a thick crayon you draw with directly — and acrylic. The Société des Amis du Musée national d'art moderne, the association of the museum's private supporters, gave it to the collection in 1993. The museum's own note reads the picture as being about 'oppressed minorities and, more directly, the slave trade', with a gilded ship and a skull in a crown of thorns.

Paris institutions now sit at the centre of how his work is shown. When the Brant Foundation, an American private collector's exhibition space, opened its New York rooms in the East Village in March 2019 with a[5] Basquiat exhibition, in the neighbourhood he had worked in thirty years earlier, the show was curated by Dieter Buchhart, the art historian who has organised most of the major Basquiat exhibitions of recent decades, and, in the foundation's own words, 'organized in collaboration with Fondation Louis Vuitton', the museum the architect Frank Gehry built out of curved glass sails in the Bois de Boulogne, the great park on the western edge of Paris.

What the paintings are worth now

On 18 May 2017 an untitled 1982 painting of a skull sold at the auction house Sotheby's in New York for 110.5 million dollars — 'the highest sum ever paid at auction for a U.S.-produced[6] artwork', as NPR, the American public radio network, reported it the next morning. Basquiat sold well while he was alive. He sold nothing at that order.

He is buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, which lists him among its notable residents[7]: 'A native of Brooklyn, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) revolutionized the art world with his bold and expressive works.'