Who is jean basquiat

He developed a severe cocaine addiction. Some acquaintances remember him spending tens of thousands of dollars at a time on drugs. Expensive electronics littered the floor, and luxury catered food, slowly rotting, packed the fridge.

If a visiting collector wondered aloud about whether his paintings would match their decor, Basquiat chased them away. Many of his works featured a single anguished head drawn in heavy oil stick marks.

Some have considered these heads a form of self-portraiture. He was flown to Italy after, but he needed more paintings to exhibit. Waiting in the airplane hangar in Modena were a series of blank, monumental canvases, ready for his Italian opening. He called it a sick factory, but got to work. His collaging had grown more sophisticated. Some historians have said the process also reflected a growing interest with Robert Rauschenberg, whose studio Basquiat later visited in Los Angeles.

He splashed the ruins with white paint. The dealer Leo Castelli showed his friend Haring, but never Basquiat. The experience was embittering. The artist also did a group of collaborative works with Warhol, who some accused of leeching off an emerging talent to remain relevant.

Feelings of dread also underpin many of these works. In Riding with Death , painted in , months before his overdose, a Black figure rides a skeleton. The background is brown and textured, free of symbols. And gradually, gradually his heroin use was catching up with him. Alhough he was greatly inspired by a trip to Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and though he had shows all over the world — Tokyo, New York, Atlanta, Hanover, Paris — it became known among his friends that he was struggling.

Mallouk would go over to his Great Jones loft. People would stop me on the street, saying Jean-Michel is in a really bad way, he has spots all over his face, he looks really out of it, you need to go and help him… It was pretty common knowledge that he was not well.

In February , Andy Warhol died at the age of Basquiat became increasingly reclusive, though he still created work for shows, and made plans, in early , to revisit Ivory Coast to go to a Senufo village. He began to talk about doing something other than art: writing perhaps, or music, or setting up a tequila business in Hawaii. In , he went to Hawaii to get clean: Davis saw him in LA afterwards.

It made her afraid. In New York, he did drugs during the day, and was dragged out to a Bryan Ferry aftershow party at bank-turned-club MK by his girlfriend, Kelly Inman, and another friend. He left quickly, with his pal Kevin Bray. They went back to the Great Jones loft, but Basquiat was nodding. Bray wrote him a note.

Bray read it out to Basquiat, and left. The next day, Inman went to the apartment at 5. Jean-Michel Basquiat was dead. It was a sad end to a rocket-flight life. Collectors sued for paintings bought but never received. There were too many Basquiat pieces knocking around on the market canvasses, according to one expert : the estate would only confirm the provenance of a few.

But the years have softened or resolved the arguments, and the work has had a life of its own. Though most of his most important art is owned by collectors, who keep it hidden away, it keeps seeping out, as if drawn to its public.

And we want his work, it appears. Not only are institutions finally coming around to his genius, but his work can be seen on T-shirts, on sneakers Reebok did a Basquiat range , on the arms of hip-hop artists.

Just samples, short clips taken out of context, snippets and hints of the full, mind-whirling Basquiat experience. His art is irrevocably intertwined with his life: his charisma and drive, his race, his talent and sad demise. But it is bigger than that. Like the best art, it needs the world and the world needs it.

And if you stand in front of a Basquiat and look, it sings its own song, just to you. Michael Holman, musician and film-maker Basquiat was born fully realised. We all went out [almost] every night, till 4 in the morning.

It was so important. Not only did we go out and blow off steam, and meet people, have sex in the bathroom, get high, all that stuff that you do in clubs. It created a community that supported each other. It was a special time. With [our band] Gray, I taped a microphone to the head of a snare drum, face down, and attached masking tape to the drum, then pulled the masking tape off and allowed that to be a sound.

Jean would loosen the strings on an electric guitar, then run a metal file across the strings. I had this cable TV show, and I asked him to do an interview. He was doing base, like a high-end form of crack. I could barely keep my focus. I could barely stop shaking, but it barely affected him. He had such a high tolerance. He was a sensationalist.

He pushed the boundaries of any kind of sensation, anything that would set off his endorphins, his nerve endings, his brain cells. He was after the sensation of something special and brilliant and different and electric and massive.

Would he have been good at middle age? When we pass that hump and start going down the other way, we are living and dying at the same time. Lenore and Herb Schorr, major New York collectors, and the first to recognise and support Basquiat Lenore : We were very excited by the first painting we saw by him. But we just felt he was a wonderful, brilliant artist, very, very early. Herb : The artists understood him — some of them. They were there first, along with a few professionals. There was not this hysteria.

Really, nothing changes. It takes 20 years after his death before a Van Gogh enters a museum. Anything which breaks new ground takes a while for people to catch up to. Lenore : Jean was very smart and he knew his art history. Modernism, Picasso, right up to the present and Jean knew it all. So we really had a nice rapport.

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Before his tragic death in at the age of twenty-seven, Basquiat expressed seemingly boundless creative energy, producing approximately a thousand paintings and two thousand drawings. Often themes accumulate through multiple references on the surface, emerging as patterns out of gestural brushstrokes, symbols, inventories, lists, and diagrams. Basquiat sought and enjoyed unlikely collisions of imagery and words, massive influxes of information and stimuli that recreated the experience of being in a world by turns exciting, inspiring, oppressive, and toxic.

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