Jean-Michel Basquiat

A car hit him in Brooklyn when he was seven and took his spleen, and his mother brought Gray's Anatomy to the hospital bed — the bones and organs in that book never left his pictures. She was the one who enrolled him as a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum. She was also the one who went into a psychiatric hospital when he was ten and spent the rest of her life going in and out of them. His father, a Haitian accountant, kept the children. Jean-Michel could read at four and was fluent in French, Spanish and English by 11. At 15 he ran away over being caught with marijuana and slept on benches in Washington Square Park until his father called the police to bring him home.

He and a schoolmate named Al Diaz started spraying an invented brand called SAMO across Lower Manhattan in May 1978 — cryptic slogans, always with a copyright mark after them. The Village Voice wrote it up that December. By June 1980 he had painted SAMO IS DEAD on the SoHo walls and put work into the Times Square Show. Then it moved very fast: a solo show in Modena in May 1981, a New York dealer who gave him materials and a basement to paint in, Documenta at 21 as the youngest artist ever included, the Whitney Biennial at 22, Mary Boone by 1983. Andy Warhol sat for a Polaroid on October 4, 1982, and a wet double portrait arrived at his door within two hours. In about ten years Basquiat made 600 paintings and 1,500 drawings.

The money arrived in a form that was hard to separate from the display of him. He was making 1.4 million dollars a year by the mid-1980s and taking 40,000-dollar lump sums from dealers, and in February 1985 the New York Times Magazine put him on the cover under the words New Art, New Money. When he and Warhol showed their collaborations at the Tony Shafrazi gallery that year, critics called him Warhol's mascot, and the friendship did not recover. He was working, meanwhile, on what the same city did to other young Black men: transit police killed the artist Michael Stewart in September 1983 and Basquiat painted Defacement. His cocaine use put a hole through his nasal septum. He entered a methadone program in late 1986 and quit it after three weeks.

He died of a heroin overdose on August 12, 1988, at his house on Great Jones Street, at 27. Warhol had been dead 18 months, most of which Basquiat spent alone. The Whitney gave him a retrospective four years later and the market has not paused since: in May 2017 a 1982 black skull sold at Christie's for 110.5 million dollars. His father ran the estate until 2013, his sisters run it now, and the crown motif is licensed to a jeweler and a video game, over objections from people who knew him. The authentication committee gave up in 2012, beaten by the volume of fakes. Defacement, the painting about Michael Stewart, went on show at the Guggenheim in 2019.

Jean-Michel Basquiat's life against the full span of the corpus.

• SAMO other
  The invented brand he and Al Diaz sprayed across Lower Manhattan 1978
• Irony of Negro Policeman artwork 1981
• Untitled artwork
  The black skull with red and yellow rivulets — 110.5 million dollars in 2017 1982
• Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump artwork 1982
• Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart) artwork
  Painted after transit police killed a young Black artist in the same downtown scene 1983
• Hollywood Africans artwork 1983

• 1968 aged ~8 Struck by a car at seven, and loses his spleen His mother brought him Gray's Anatomy in the hospital. His parents separated the same year.
• May 1978 aged 17 SAMO tags begin appearing across Lower Manhattan The Village Voice published an article about them on December 11, 1978.
• June 1980 aged 19 Writes SAMO IS DEAD on SoHo walls and shows work at the Times Square Show
• June 1982 aged 21 Becomes the youngest artist ever included in Documenta, at 21 His work hung alongside Beuys, Kiefer, Richter, Twombly and Warhol.
• October 4, 1982 aged 21 Meets Andy Warhol and returns a wet double portrait within two hours
• September 1983 aged 22 Transit police kill the artist Michael Stewart Basquiat painted Defacement in response.
• February 10, 1985 aged 24 The New York Times Magazine puts him on the cover under New Art, New Money
• February 1987 aged 26 Andy Warhol dies Basquiat spent most of his last 18 months as a recluse.
• August 12, 1988 aged 27 Dies of a heroin overdose at 27 on Great Jones Street He is buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

• Andy Warhol 1928–1987
  Pop art pioneer whose Campbell's soup cans and celebrity portraits defined contemporary American art. collaborator
• Keith Haring 1958–1990
  Street artist whose bold, cartoon-like figures addressed social issues and brought art to public spaces. friend in the same scene
• Madonna b. 1958
  The Queen of Pop who reshaped the music industry and became a symbol of female empowerment and reinvention. lived with in Los Angeles
• Romare Bearden 1911–1988
  Artist who used collage to depict African American life and culture in the 20th century. earlier in the same argument
• Kara Walker b. 1969
  Contemporary artist whose silhouette installations confront the brutal history of American slavery and racism. later in the same argument
• Jay-Z b. 1969
  Rapper and entrepreneur whose career helped move hip-hop from a subculture to the center of American business and culture. carried the work into hip-hop