Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement.

Basquiat was born on December 22, 1960, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York City, the second of four children to Matilde Basquiat (née Andrades, 1934–2008) and Gérard Basquiat (1930–2013).

He had an older brother, Max, who died shortly before his birth, and two younger sisters, Lisane (b. 1964) and Jeanine (b. 1967).

His father was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and his mother was born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents.

He was raised Catholic.

Matilde instilled a love for art in her young son by taking him to local art museums and enrolling him as a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Basquiat was a precocious child who learned to read and write by the age of four.

His mother encouraged her son's artistic talent and he often tried to draw his favorite cartoons.

In 1967, he started attending Saint Ann's School, a private school.

There he met his friend Marc Prozzo and together they created a children's book, written by Basquiat at the age of seven and illustrated by Prozzo.

In 1968, Basquiat was hit by a car while playing in the street at the age of seven.

His arm was broken and he suffered several internal injuries, which required a splenectomy.

While he was hospitalized, his mother brought him a copy of Gray's Anatomy to keep him occupied.

After his parents separated that year, Basquiat and his sisters were raised by their father.

His mother was admitted to a psychiatric hospital when he was ten and thereafter spent her life in and out of institutions.

By the age of eleven, Basquiat was fluent in French, Spanish and English, and an avid reader of all three languages.

Basquiat first achieved notoriety in the late 1970s as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, alongside Al Diaz, writing enigmatic epigrams all over Manhattan, particularly in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop music culture.

Basquiat's family resided in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Boerum Hill and then in 1974, moved to Miramar, Puerto Rico.

When they returned to Brooklyn in 1976, Basquiat attended Edward R. Murrow High School.

He struggled to deal with his mother's instability and rebelled as a teenager.

He ran away from home at 15 when his father caught him smoking cannabis in his room.

He slept on park benches at Washington Square Park and took LSD.

Eventually, his father spotted him with a shaved head and called the police to bring him home.

In May 1978, Basquiat and Diaz began spray painting graffiti on buildings in Lower Manhattan.

Working under the pseudonym SAMO, they inscribed poetic and satirical advertising slogans such as "SAMO© AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO GOD."

In June 1978, Basquiat was expelled from City-As-School for pieing the principal.

By the early 1980s, his paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally.

At 21, Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever take part in Documenta in Kassel, Germany.

At 22, he was one of the youngest to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial in New York.

Since his death at the age of 27 in 1988, Basquiat's work has steadily increased in value.

The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his artwork in 1992.

Basquiat's art focused on dichotomies such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience.

He appropriated poetry, drawing, and painting, and married text and image, abstraction, figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique.

He used social commentary in his paintings as a tool for introspection and for identifying with his experiences in the black community, as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism.

In the 10th grade, he enrolled at City-As-School, an alternative high school in Manhattan, home to many artistic students who found conventional schooling difficult.

He would skip school with his friends, but still received encouragement from his teachers, and began to write and illustrate for the school newspaper.

He developed the character SAMO to endorse a faux religion.

The saying "SAMO" had started as a private joke between Basquiat and his schoolmate Al Diaz, as an abbreviation for the phrase "Same old shit."

They drew a series of cartoons for their school paper before and after using SAMO©.

In 2017, Untitled, a 1982 painting depicting a black skull with red and yellow rivulets, sold for a record-breaking $110.5 million, becoming one of the most expensive paintings ever purchased.