A poet, musician, and graffiti prodigy in the late-1970s in New York, Jean-Michel Basquiat had honed his signature painting style of obsessive scribbling, elusive symbols and diagrams, with mask-and-skull imagery by the time he was 20. “I don’t think about art while I work,” he once said. “I think about life.” Basquiat drew his subjects from his own Caribbean heritage—his father was Haitian, and his mother was of Puerto Rican descent—and a convergence of African American, African, and Aztec cultural histories with Classical themes and contemporary heroes like athletes and musicians. Often associated with Neo-expressionism, Basquiat received massive acclaim in only a few short years, showing alongside artists like Julian Schnabel and David Salle. In 1983, he met Andy Warhol, who would come to be a mentor and idol. The two collaborated on a series of paintings before Warhol’s death in 1987, followed by Basquiat’s own untimely passing a year later.
Often spotted beside Keith Haring and Andy Warhol, Basquiat would show up to Mr. Chow decked out in an Armani suit. He’d drink kir royale and socialize with the art-world elite, he was 24. He had gone from selling drawings for $50 in 1980 to selling canvases “at a brisk pace—so brisk, some observers joked, that the paint was barely dry.” Not everyone knew what to make of the young Black man and his frenetic, rebellious paintings, but everyone wanted to be associated with him.
Basquiat’s career did not last long—he died at 27 of a heroin overdose in 1988. He left behind 917 drawings, 25 sketchbooks, 85 prints, and 171 paintings.
In May 2016, one of his “Head” paintings sold for $57.3 million. The following year, Untitled, a Basquiat from 1982, sold for $110.5 million at Sotheby’s, setting a record for an American artist.
Jean-Michel Basquiat remains one of the most important and influential artists of the modern and contemporary art period… In May Basquiat beat Andy Warhol to be the most expensive American artist, after a $110 million sale of his artwork, ‘Untitled (1982)’, at a Sotheby’s auction.
