"I was trying to communicate an idea, I was trying to paint a very urban landscape…and I wanted to make very direct paintings that most people would feel the emotion behind when they saw them."
Jean-Michel Basquiat emerged as a dynamic force in the New York art world of the late 20th century, forging an enduring legacy in a brief yet prolific career. Born in Brooklyn to a Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat was immersed in a multicultural and multilingual household–an upbringing that would shape the global lexicon of his visual language. Leaving home as a teenager, he began his artistic career as a graffiti poet in Lower Manhattan’s downtown scene, channeling societal critique through his early alter ego, SAMO.
Basquiat’s transition from street to studio in the early 1980s coincided with the arrival of German Neo-Expressionism which brought about a resurgent appetite for painting and brought about the return of the human figure in contemporary art. Basquiat’s work quickly captivated the art world with its raw vitality, dynamism, and singularity. In 1980, the artist was exhibited in the groundbreaking Times Square Show, which launched his meteoric rise. Critics’ reviews solidified his status as a trailblazer–one who straddled the graffiti and punk scenes while bridging New York’s downtown art scene and the newly arrived German Neo-Expressionist movement.
In 1982, Basquiat held six solo exhibitions and was the youngest artist to be included in Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany. That same year, he produced more than 200 works—gestural, vivid, and layered with text, symbols, inventories, and diagrams that mapped his intellectual and cultural universe. Basquiat befriended Andy Warhol in the early 1980s, and the two collaborated on artworks with Warhol painting first and Basquiat overlaying the work.
Basquiat’s paintings reflect a fusion of drawing and writing, history and music, philosophy and street culture. At once erudite and visceral, his compositions articulate alternative histories and center the Black experience while confronting the legacies of colonialism and systemic racism. His iconography—crowns, skeletal figures, fragmented text—draws inspiration from jazz, bebop, West African spirituality, Renaissance art, and African American history, bridging personal narrative and collective memory.
Basquiat's surfaces teem with complexity: spontaneity meets control; high art collides with popular culture. Across an oeuvre of nearly a thousand paintings and over two thousand drawings, Basquiat constructed an archive of the human condition—one that continues to resonate with contemporary discourses on race, culture, and identity.