Jean Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat – Difficult family circumstances, versatile artistic talent

Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in New York on 22 December 1960. The roots of his family lay in Puerto Rico and Haiti; one older brother died before he was born. His mother was interested in art, taught him painting and drawing and took him to visit the Brooklyn Museum. His family was financially able to send Basquiat to a catholic private school, but his psychologically ill mother left her husband and children in 1968, leaving little Jean-Michel to live his life more or less as a loner. He did not have any real friends, but by the age of eleven was fluent in Spanish and French as well as American English. He lived partly with his father and sisters in Puerto Rico. Although he received special support as a gifted student, he ran away from home several times, mainly due to the tensions between him and his father. 

Friendship with Andy Warhol, an intuition for artistic trends

Jean-Michel Basquiat was also interested in music and made it so far with the clarinet and synthesizer that he appeared as a recurring guest alongside Chris Stein, Debbie Harry and Klaus Nomi on the punk rock underground show TV Party – also where Basquiat met Andy Warhol through the host Glenn O’Brien. An intensive friendship developed between the two artists, and Warhol produced a large number of nude portraits of Basquiat. A great number of letters and diary entries document the close connection between the two men. Jean-Michel Basquiat possessed not only an outstanding artistic talent but also an unerring sense for making the right contacts and recognising trends. He was part of the great creative movements of the 1970s and 1980s, taking centre stage as a self-taught artist, independent of the established art industry and critics. In 1982, at the age of 21, he was the youngest ever participant of documenta in Kassel.

A graffiti artist, who did not want to be part of the graffiti scene

Jean-Michel Basquiat worked with artists such as Keith Haring, Salvador Dali and Joseph Beuys for André Heller’s project Luna Luna. Like Julian Schnabel and David Salle, Basquiat belonged to the Neo-Expressionist movement, drawing his visual language from African culture, and mixing its styles and symbols with the improvisational joy and unrestrained nature of action painting and performance art. He liked to use the acronym SAMO© as a signature which, according to the artist, stood for ‘same old shit’, a euphemism in the African American community for the racist structures in the USA. However, the artist himself rejected the attribution often applied to the graffiti scene. Basquiat suffered greatly from drug addiction, which he finally tried to cure by visiting African shaman on the Ivory Coast. Unfortunately, the trip, which he planned to take with the artist Ouattara Watts, could no longer be realised. 

Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose on 12 August 1988. He was only 27 years old.