21 Facts About Jean-Michel Basquiat

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^{JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, NEW YORK, 1985. PHOTOGRAPH BY EVELYN HOFER/GETTY IMAGES.}

1. Jean-Michel Basquiat was born on December 22, 1960, in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Gérard, was born in Port au Prince, Haiti, and his mother Matilde was a New York-native of Puerto Rican descent. The artist grew up speaking Spanish, French and English.

2. Basquiat became a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum, his favorite museum, at the age of six.  In the spring of 2018, after Japanese collector Yusaku Maezawa purchased Untitled (1982) for a record-breaking $110.5 million dollars in 2017, the museum featured the homecoming exhibition One Basquiat — devoted solely to the iconic image.

3. At eight-years-old, Basquiat was hit by a car while playing in the street and suffered a broken arm and severe internal injuries. While he was recuperating from a splenoctomy, his mother brought him a copy of the foundational medical textbook Gray’s Anatomy. The volume’s detailed anatomical drawings were eye-opening to him. Years later Basquiat named his noise band “Gray” in homage this early influence.

4. His father threw him out of the house when he dropped out of school at the age of seventeen, The teenager scraped by — selling sweatshirts and postcards with his drawings, panhandling and crashing with friends. His impoverished diet consisted primarily of copious amounts of cheap red wine and bags of 15-cent Cheetos.

Jean-Michel’s crown has three peaks, for his three royal lineages: the poet, the musician, the great boxing champion.

^{JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, UNTITLED, 1982.  SOLD FOR $110.5 MILLION IN THE CONTEMPORARY ART EVENING AUCTION, MAY 2017.}

5. It was his graffiti tag “SAMO” (shorthand for “same old shit”) that first drew public attention. Basquiat created “SAMO” with his friend Al Diaz while the pair were in high school. The  tag — which often featured the copyright symbol – cropped up on buildings throughout lower Manhattan and Brooklyn between 1977 and 1980 – often in the vicinity surrounding the School of Visual Arts. "It was supposed to be a logo, like Pepsi.” Basquiat later told writer Anthony Haden-Guest.  The end of the collaboration came in 1980 with a slue of tags announcing  “SAMO is dead.”

6. His imagery drew from African and Caribbean culture – with bones, skulls and arrows rendered in pulsating, gestural lines and bold daubs of color. The West African figure of the ‘griot’ or storyteller appears in a number of his paintings as well as contemporary black celebrities and musician. In 1986 he traveled to Africa for a show in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.

7. The crown – Basquiat’s signature artistic motif – adorned black males figures he painted. He elevated these figures – althetes, musicians and writers among them – to royal even saintly stature. “Jean-Michel’s crown has three peaks, for his three royal lineages: the poet, the musician, the great boxing champion,” said Francesco Clemente, “Jean measured his skill against all he deemed strong, without prejudice as to their taste or age.”

^{THE 1985 EXHIBITION POSTER FOR AN EXHIBITION OF ANDY WARHOL AND JEAN MICHEL BASQUIAT. 
PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF PVDE /BRIDGEMAN IMAGES.} 

8. Basquiat became a regular on art writer Glenn O’Brien’s public access television program TV Party — first appearing on the live show in 1979 with his head shaved down the middle.  Two years later  he appeared in O’Brien’s 1981 film Downtown ’81 playing a nearly autobiographical character.

9. An enthusiastic musician and dj, he produced a rap record with Rammellzee and K Robb titled "Beat Bop" (1983) and designed the cover for the single.

10. The limelight suited Basquiat.  In 1980 he appeared in music video for Blondie’s song “Rapture.” It was lead singer Debbie Harry and her boyfriend Chris Stein who bought Basquiat’s first painting for a mere $200.

^{JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, UNTITLED, 1982. SOLD FOR £14.7 IN THE CONTEMPORARY ART EVENING AUCTION, JUNE 2018.} 

11.  Basquiat gained momentum with his first (indoor) exhibition —the landmark DIY Times Square Show which opened in June of 1980 in an abandoned massage parlor off Seventh Avenue which also featured works by Keith Haring, Kiki Smith, Jenny Holzer and Kenny Scharf.

12.  Along with Julian Schnabel, Kenny Scarf and Francesco Clemente, Basquiat was counted the leading figures Neo Expressionism, an art movement that reasserted the primacy of the human figure. In 1996, fellow Neo-Expressionist Schnabel directed a biopic of the artist’s life with Jeffrey Wright starring as Basquiat and David Bowie as Warhol.

13. In 1982,  at the age of 25, he became the youngest artist to ever exhibit at Documenta in Kassel, Germany, when nearly 60 of his paintings were featured alongside like likes of Joseph Beuys.

14. Basquiat’s relationships with gallerists were fickle and fraught. In 1982  he joined the Annina Nosei gallery, where he had his first American one-man show in the spring of that year.  After a period of back-and-forth his first American gallery and enjoying increasing success, Basquiat left Annina Nosei for Mary Boone Gallery where he had an important 1984 solo show. By the end of his life he was showing in New York with Vrej Baghoomian Gallery.

^{JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT PAINTING IN ST. MORITZ, SWITZERLAND, 1983. PHOTOGRAPH BY LEE JAFFE/GETTY IMAGES.}

15. He briefly dated Madonna, while both were on the precipice of mainstream stardom. His work ethic was formative to the singer who later reminisced,  “I remember getting up in the middle of the night and he wouldn’t be in bed lying next to me; he’d be standing, painting, at four in the morning, this close to the canvas, in a trance. I was blown away by that, that he worked when he felt moved.”

16. In 1982 Basquiat moved to Los Angeles where he lived with the gallerist Larry Gagosian for a year ahead of a solo show at the gallery's Los Angeles location. Madonna joined them for a few months. Basquiat would return to Los Angeles several times a year for the rest of this life, staying at ritzy hotels from the trendy Chateau Marmont to the more tony L’Hermitage.

17. He met his lifelong friend and mentor Andy Warhol in 1981 at late-night hotspot Mr. Chow's. Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger later suggested the two collaborate on a series of paintings, which culminated in a series of paintings made between 1983–85 that layered Basquiat’s graffiti over Warhol’s Pop imagery. The exhibition poster for their 1985 joint show at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York featured the now iconic imagery of Warhol and Basquiat posed as boxers facing off.

I'm not a real person. I'm a legend.

^{jEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, CABRA, 1981–82. SOLD FOR $11 MILLION IN THE CONTEMPORARY ART EVENING AUCTION, NOVEMBER 2017.} 

18. With newfound wealth he spent lavish amounts of money on Armani suits, expensive wines and the finest hotels. “From being so critical of the art scene, Jean-Michel was all of a sudden becoming the thing he criticized,” said Keith Haring, his longtime friend. But his libertine squandering were touched by self-effacement — he was know for painting over his designer suits, lending obscene sums of money, even throwing $100 in dollar bills out of his limousine window to panhandlers.

19. Both the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art rejected submissions of his work.

20. Basquiat died of an accidental drug overdose on August 12, 1988, at his  Great Jones Street studio. He was 27 years old. In the months preceding his death, he claimed to be using a hundred bags of heroin a day.  Curator and gallerist Jeffrey Deitch delivered a eulogy during his burial at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. 

21. "I'm not a real person. I'm a legend,” Basquiat once declared. He appears to have fulfilled his prophecy in the decades since his death. The iconic artist is collected by the likes of Kanye West, Swizz Beats and Jay Z. Fellow Brookly-native Jay-Z dressed at the famed artist for Halloween in 2014 and has lyrically name-dropped the artist on a number of tracks.  In his 2013 song Picasso Baby, he proclaims, ”It ain’t hard to tell, I’m the new Jean-Michel.”

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