Jean-Michel Basquiat, born in December 22, 1960, in Brooklyn, New York started as a graphite artist with friends in the big city of New York, in the 1970s and in the 1980s produced Neo-expressionist paintings.

By the age of four he learned how to read and write and by the age of eleven, Basquiat could fluently speak, read, and write French, Spanish and English.

In September 1968, Basquiat was hit by a car while playing in the street breaking his arm and suffering several internal injuries. His parents separated that same year and he and his sisters were raised by their father.

At the age of 15, Basquiat ran away from home. He slept on park benches in Washington Square Park, and was arrested and returned to the care of his father within a week.

Basquiat dropped out school in the tenth grade and is father banished him from the household. Basquiat stayed with friends in Brooklyn supporting himself by selling T-shirts and homemade post cards.

In 1976, Basquiat and friends Al Diaz and Shannon Dawson began spray-painting graffiti on buildings in Lower Manhattan, working under the pseudonym SAMO. The designs had messages such as "Plush safe he think.. SAMO" and "SAMO as an escape clause.^”This SAMO project ended with the message "SAMO IS DEAD," inscribed on the walls of SoHo buildings in 1979.

In 1979, Basquiat meet Glenn O’Brian, started a friendship. That same year, Basquiat formed The Noise rock band Gray with Shannon Dawson, Michael Holman, Nick Taylor, Wayne Clifford and Vincent Gallo, that performed at nightclubs. In 1980 O'Brien introduced Basquiat to Andy Warhol, with who he later collaborated.

In 1981, Rene Richard published "The Radiant Child" in Artforum magazine, which brought Basquiat to the attention of the art world.

Late in 1981, he joined the Annina Nosei gallery in SoHo. By 1982, Basquiat was showing regularly together with Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi, involved with the Neo-expressionist movement. Basquiat painted in Armani suits, and often appeared in public in the same paint-splattered $1,000 suits.

On February 10, 1986, he appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in a feature entitled "New Art, New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist".He was a successful artist in this period, but his growing heroin addiction began to interfere with his personal relationships.

When Andy Warhol died on February 22, 1987, Basquiat became increasingly isolated and very depressive, and his heroin addiction grew more and more. He attempted at sobriety during a trip to Hawaii, but failed completely dying on August 12, 1988, of a heroin overdose. He was 27 years old and was found in his art studio at his art studio in Great Jones Street, SoHo, New York City.

Before his career as a painter began, he produced punk-inspired postcards for sale on the street, and became known for the political–poetical graffiti under the name of SAMO. He would often draw on random objects and surfaces.

His work is abstract and he uses a conjunction of various media the artists also likes to incorporate text and codes such as: words, letters, numerals, pictograms, logos, map symbols, diagrams, etc., to help him with his message.

Between 1982 and 1985 he introduced various paintings and individual canvases with exposed stretcher bars, the surface dense with writing, collage and imagery. In 1984-85 was the main period of the Basquiat and Warhol collaborations.

When he was in the hospital at the age of seven his mother gave him the Gray's Anatomy book which was his major reference source. It remained influential in his descriptions of human anatomy, and in its mixture of image and text. Other major sources were Henry Dreyfuss Symbol Sourcebook, Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks, and Brentjes African Rock Art.

Basquiat doodled often and some of his later pieces exhibited this; they were often coloured pencil on paper with a loose, spontaneous, and dirty style much like his paintings.

On Top we can see one of his pieces, the Mona Lisa (1983). This work is (in the opinion of some of the critics, and in my opinion too) seems to be Basquiat's answer to Warhol's Dollar Bill (on the rigth). In the top part we can read “this note is a legal tender for all debts public and private.” and “federal reserve note” and we also can see the number “1” in the left and in the right. This part represents a dollar note that has the Mona Lisa face, in the middle, that then continuous through the rest of the painting.

The way that he represents the Mona Lisa itself is peculiar. We can see beard and a masculine facial expression. I think that the artist is trying to represents the rumour that some people say as truth that the Mona Lisa is an feminine version of Leonardo da Vinci portrait.

The mood and atmosphere is rough and messy. This picture is about society and cosmism. The inflexible and urgent way that the artist spent the money made is legend. In this painting he lets us know that although he loved
money his vital devotion is art. This picture is all about blocks of colour and line.

His art work is spontaneous, without any kind of previous sketch and he usually paints large fields of think colour with acrylic paint, while drawing and writing in oil stick, making thick and untidy lines.

This seems to be a flat image with no 3D angles. However, the size and shape of the river in the right side of the painting gives an idea of depth, the idea that the river is behind Mona Lisa and further than the place where she is.

He chose dark colours similar with the original Da Vinci Mona Lisa painting colours, but with a different tone of value, more exaggerated, as for example: the yellow in the note comes from the sky of the Da Vinci painting, that seems to be a sunset sky; the dark river in the right; and the brown and red in her hair is to give a more exaggerated tone of the Mona Lisa hair.

Website: www.basquiat.com

Artist Work: