Manifestations of West African Cosmologies in the Common Video and Jean Michel Basquiats Art

Jean-Michel Basquiat moved from graffiti creative person to downtown punk scenester to celebrity fine art star in only the few brusk years of his career. This vertiginous rise took him from sleeping on the streets of New York City to being befriended by Andy Warhol and entering into the elite American art world every bit one of the well-nigh celebrated painters of the Neo-Expressionism fine art movement. Whilst Basquiat died at only 27 of a heroin overdose, he has now become indelibly associated with the surge in interest in downtown artists in New York during the 1980s.

His work explored his mixed African, Latinx, and American heritage through a visual vocabulary of personally resonant signs, symbols, and figures, and his art adult rapidly in scale, telescopic, and ambition as he moved from the street to the gallery. Much of his work referenced the stardom between wealth and poverty, and reflected his unique position as a working-class person of color within the celebrity art world. In the years following his death, the attention to (and value of) his work has steadily increased, with one painting even setting a new record in 2017 for the highest price paid for an American artist's work at auction.

Biography of Jean-Michel Basquiat

Childhood

Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn in 1960. His mother, Matilde Andradas was born also born in Brooklyn but to parents from Puerto Rico. His father, Gerard Basquiat, was an immigrant from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. As a result of this mixed heritage the young Jean-Michel was fluent in both French and Spanish equally well as English language. His early readings of French symbolist poetry in their original language would afterward be an influence on the artworks that he made every bit an adult. Basquiat displayed a talent for art in early childhood, learning to draw and paint with his mother's encouragement and often using supplies (such as paper) brought home from his male parent'south job as an auditor. Together Basquiat and his mother attended many museum exhibitions in New York, and by the age of six Jean-Michel was enrolled every bit a Junior Fellow member of the Brooklyn Museum. He was also a keen athlete, competing in track events at his school.

After being striking past a car while playing in the street at historic period 8, Basquiat underwent surgery for the removal of his spleen. This upshot led to his reading the famous medical and artistic treatise, Gray'south Anatomy (originally published in 1858), which was given to him past his mother whilst he recovered. The sinewy bio-mechanical images of this text, along with the comic book fine art and cartoons that the young Basquiat enjoyed, would one day come to inform the graffiti-inscribed canvases for which he became known.

After his parents' divorce, Basquiat lived alone with his begetter, his mother having been determined unfit to care for him due to her mental health problems. Citing concrete and emotional abuse, Basquiat eventually ran away from home and was adopted by a friend's family. Although he attended school sporadically in New York and Puerto Rico, where his begetter had attempted to move the family unit in 1974, he finally dropped out of Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn in September 1978, at the age of 17.

Early on Training

As Basquiat stated, "I never went to art schoolhouse. I failed the art courses that I did take in school. I but looked at a lot of things. And that'south how I learnt about fine art, past looking at it". Basquiat's fine art was fundamentally rooted in the New York City graffiti scene of the 1970s. After becoming involved in an Upper Due west Side drama group called Family unit Life Theater he developed the grapheme SAMO (an acronym for "Same Old Shit"), a human who tried to sell a fake religion to audiences. In 1976, he and an artist friend, Al Diaz, started spray-painting buildings in Lower Manhattan under this nom de plume. The SAMO pieces were largely text based, and communicated an anti-establishment, anti-religion, and anti-politics bulletin. The text of these messages was accompanied by logos and imagery that would later feature in Basquiat's solo work, particularly the 3-pointed crown.

The SAMO pieces shortly received media attending from the counterculture press, most notably the Village Voice, a publication that documented art, civilization, and music that saw itself as distinct from the mainstream. When Basquiat and Diaz had a disagreement and decided to stop working together, Basquiat ended the projection with the terse message: SAMO IS Expressionless. This message appeared on the facade of several SoHo art galleries and downtown buildings during 1980. Subsequently taking notation of the declaration, Basquiat'southward friend and Street Art collaborator Keith Haring staged a mock wake for SAMO at Social club 57, an cloak-and-dagger nightclub in the Eastward Hamlet.

During this period Basquiat was ofttimes homeless and forced to sleep at friend'due south apartments or on park benches, supporting himself past panhandling, dealing drugs, and peddling paw-painted postcards and T-shirts. He frequented downtown clubs still, particularly the Mudd Society and Club 57, where he was known as part of the "infant oversupply" of younger attendees (this group besides included thespian Vincent Gallo). Both clubs were popular hangouts for a new generation of visual artists and musicians, including Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, movie manager Jim Jarmusch and Ann Magnusson, all of whom became friends and occasional collaborators with Basquiat. Haring in item was a notable rival every bit well equally a friend, and the 2 are often remembered every bit competing with each other to improve the scope, scale, and ambition of their work. The two both gained recognition at similar points in their careers, progressing in parallel to reach the heights of fine art world distinction.

Due in part to his immersion in this downtown scene, Basquiat began to gain more opportunities to prove his fine art, and became a key figure in the new downtown artistic movement. For case, he appeared as a nightclub DJ in Blondie's music video Rapture, cementing his cache as a figure within the "new wave" of absurd music, art, and film emerging from the Lower East Side. During this fourth dimension he also formed and performed with his ring Grayness. Basquiat was critical of the lack of people of color in the downtown scene, all the same, and in the tardily 1970s he also began spending time uptown with graffiti artists in the Bronx and Harlem.

Afterward his work was included in the celebrated Times Square Show of June 1980, Basquiat's contour rose higher, and he had his beginning solo exhibition in 1982 at the Annina Nosei Gallery in SoHo. Rene Ricard's Artforum article, "The Radiant Child", of Dec 1981, solidified Basquiat'southward position equally a ascension star in the wider art world, also every bit the conjunction between the uptown graffiti and downtown punk scenes his work represented. Basquiat'due south rise to wider recognition coincided with the arrival in New York of the German language Neo-Expressionist move, which provided a congenial forum for his own street-smart, curbside expressionism. Basquiat began exhibiting regularly alongside artists like Julian Schnabel and David Salle, all of whom were reacting, to one degree or another, confronting the recent fine art-historical dominance of Conceptualism and Minimalism. Neo-Expressionism marked the return of painting and the re-emergence of the human being figure in contemporary art making. Images of the African Diaspora and classic Americana punctuated Basquiat's work at this time, some of which was featured at the prestigious Mary Boone Gallery in solo shows in the mid 1980s (Basquiat was afterwards represented by art dealer and gallerist Larry Gagosian in Los Angeles).

Mature Period

1982 was a significant year for Basquiat. He opened six solo shows in cities across the earth, and became the youngest artist ever to be included in Documenta, the prestigious international gimmicky art extravaganza held every five years in Kassel, Deutschland. During this time, Basquiat created some 200 fine art works and developed a signature motif: a heroic, crowned blackness oracle figure. The legendary jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie and boxers Sugar Ray Robinson, and Muhammad Ali were among Basquiat's inspirations for his work during this period. Sketchy and often abstract, the portraits captured the essence rather than the physical likeness of their subjects. The ferocity of Basquiat'due south technique, with slashes of paint and dynamic dashes of line, was intended to reveal what he saw as his subjects' inner self, their hidden feelings, and their deepest desires. These works also reinforced the intellect and passion of their subjects, rather than being fixated on the fetishized Black male person body. Some other ballsy figuration, based on the Due west African griot, besides features heavily in this era of Basquiat'due south piece of work. The griot propagated community history in West African civilisation through storytelling and vocal, and he was typically depicted by Basquiat with a grimace and squinting elliptical eyes stock-still deeply on the observer. Basquiat's artistic strategies and personal ascendency was in keeping with a wider Black Renaissance in the New York art globe of the same era (exemplified by the widespread attention beingness given at the time to the piece of work of artists such equally Organized religion Ringgold and Jacob Lawrence).

By the early 1980s, Basquiat had befriended Pop artist Andy Warhol, with whom he collaborated on a series of works from 1984 to 1986, such as 10 Punching Bags (Terminal Supper) (1985-86). Warhol would often paint starting time, and so Basquiat would layer over his work. In 1985, a New York Times Magazine feature article declared Basquiat the hot immature American artist of the 1980s. This relationship became the subject of friction between Basquiat and many of his downtown contemporaries, as it appeared to marker a new interest in the commercial dimension of the art market.

Warhol was as well criticized for potential exploitation of a young and fashionable artist of colour to boost his own credentials as current and relevant to the newly significant East Village scene. Broadly speaking, these collaborations were not well received past either audiences or critics, and are now often viewed as bottom works of both artists.

Perhaps as a result of the new-found fame and commercial force per unit area put upon his work, Basquiat was by this point of his life becoming increasingly addicted to both heroin and cocaine. Several friends linked this dependency to the stress of maintaining his career and the pressures of existence a person of colour in a predominantly white art world. Basquiat died of a heroin overdose in his apartment in 1988 at the age of 27.

The Legacy of Jean-Michel Basquiat

In his curt life Jean-Michel Basquiat all the same came to play an of import and historic role in the ascent of the downtown cultural scene in New York and Neo-Expressionism more broadly. While the larger public latched on to the superficial exoticism of his piece of work and were captivated by his overnight celebrity, his art, which has oftentimes been described inaccurately as "naif" and "ethnically gritty", held of import connections to expressive precursors, such equally Jean Dubuffet and Cy Twombly.

A product of the celebrity and commerce-obsessed culture of the 1980s, Basquiat and his work continue to serve for many observers as a metaphor for the dangers of creative and social excess. Similar the comic book superheroes that formed an early influence, Basquiat rocketed to fame and riches, and then, just as speedily, autumn back to Earth, the victim of drug corruption and eventual overdose.

The recipient of posthumous retrospectives at the Brooklyn Museum (2005) and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1992), as well equally the subject of numerous biographies and documentaries, including Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Kid (2010), and Julian Schnabel's characteristic film, Basquiat (1996; starring erstwhile friend David Bowie as Andy Warhol), Basquiat and his counter-cultural legacy persist. In 2017, another film Boom for Real: The Tardily Teenage Years of Jean Michel Basquiat was released to critical acclaim, also inspiring an exhibition of the same title at the Barbican art gallery in London. His art remains a constant source of inspiration for contemporary artists, and his brusk life a constant source of involvement and speculation for an art industry that thrives on biographical legend.

Aslope his friend and gimmicky Keith Haring, Basquiat's art has come up to stand in for that particular flow of countercultural New York art. Both artists' work is frequently exhibited aslope the other's (most recently in the 2019 exhibition 'Keith Haring I Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines' in Melbourne, Australia), and at that place have been a number of commercial licenses granted for the reproduction of several of his visual motifs. Recently this has included a range of graphic print shirts at Uniqlo displaying the work of both artists.

The rise in Basquiat's profile since his decease has besides pushed new artists to make work inspired by or even in direct reference to his work. This includes painters, graffiti and installation artists working within the gallery, but also musicians, poets and filmmakers. Visual artists influenced by Basquiat include David Hewitt, Scott Haley, Barb Sherin, and Mi Be in North America, as well as European and Asian artists such as David Joly, Mathieu Bernard-Martin, Mikael Teo, and Andrea Chisesi, all of whom cite his work equally formative to their own evolution. Musicians such as Kojey Radical, Shabaka Hutchings, and Lex Amor have similarly praised his work as informing their own. These 3 musical artists in particular appeared aslope others on Untitled, a collaborative compilation released as a tribute to Basquiat in 2019 by London based record characterization The Vinyl Manufactory.

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Source: https://www.theartstory.org/artist/basquiat-jean-michel/

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