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| Jean
Michel Basquiat |
December 22, 1960 - August 12, 1988
an American artist born in Brooklyn, New York.
His mother was a Puerto Rican and his father of Haitian origin.
He had started as a street artist painting graffiti art and then he became a very popular and successful avant-garde artist.
His style was very original - nervous, fierce and energetic.
Basquiat's career divides into three broad though overlapping phases:
In the earliest, from 1980 to late 1982, Basquiat used painterly gestures on canvas, most often depicting skeletal figures and mask-like faces that signal his obsession with mortality, and imagery derived from his street existence, such as automobiles, buildings, police, children's sidewalk, games and graffiti.
A middle period from late 1982 to 1985 features multipanel paintings and individual canvases with exposed stretcher bars, the surface dense with writing, collage and seemingly unrelated imagery. These works reveal a strong interest in Basquiat´s black and Hispanic identity and his identification with historical and contemporary black figures and events.
The last phase, from about 1986 to Basquiat's death in 1988, displays a new type of figurative depiction, in a new painterly style, with different symbols, sources, and content.
He was a close friend of Andy Warhol, and the two made a number of collaborative works.
Basquiat became addicted to heroin, and died of an overdose.
Jean Michel Basquiat
graffito grows up.
slightly.
1960-1986
Would have been at home with cavemen daubing the walls of their caves, though they might have found his colour schemes a bit unhinged. Unbalanced images delibero-crude, out of the tube colours and a whiff of child-like.
Basquiat died young, which always helps a myth.His works are revered, he's even had a film made about him. But when you get down to the graffiti inspirede works themselves, well. best seen as a summation of a period in underground NYC where the artist has borrowed like a magpie and painted a history of the period he didn't survive.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Basquiat".