Jean-Michel Basquiat
(1960-1988)
Jean-Michel Basquiat was a graffiti artist that quickly rose to fame until his death at a very young age. One of Basquiat’s first works was a comic written for his school paper about a young searcher for truth who wants to find a modern and stylish form of spirituality, who struggles to escape the falsity of established religions. He created his pure religion called SAMO, and this soon became the pseudonym he signed all of his art. He quickly became a fixture in the NYC nightclub scene. He worked as a disc jockey, played in a band called Gray, and sold painted T-shirts for extra money. He was familiar with some of the most prominent artists of the 1980s and the owner of the Mudd Club and filmmaker Diego Cortez. He gained a role in New York Beat in 1981 due to his connection with Cortez. Also, in 1981 he achieved critical acclaim in the magazine Artforum and held his first one-man show in Modena, Italy, under the name SAMO. Basquiat’s first American one-man show came in 1982 at Annina Nosei’s gallery. The show exhibited his work called Anatomy(1982). He also produced the hip-hop single “ Beat Bop” (1983) Rammellzee and K-Rob.
Basquiat found a close friend in pop artist Andy Warhol. After almost unanimously negative reviews on the Basquiat-Warhol collaborative show (1985), Warhol pulled away from Basquiat and died two years later. The death of Warhol impacted Basquiat greatly and intended to give up painting shortly after. He died in the studio he had rented from Warhol in 1988. Jean-Michel Basquiat produced art to make statements, not to make money. Ironically, as much as he hated the high prices charged for art, the price paid for his art today continues to increase. In 2002, Sotheby’s auctioned Profit I for $5.5 Million, and in May 2017, they auctioned Untitled (1982) (a skull done in oil stick and spray paint) for $110.5 million. It was the first time a piece of art created after 1980 sold for more than $100 million. It also holds the record for the most expensive work by an American artist, previously held by Warhol for Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) (1963), sold in 2013 for $105 million.
