Jean-Michel Basquiat

"If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you’ve got to realize that influence is not influence. It’s simply someone’s idea going through my new mind.”

– Jean-Michel Basquiat

December 22 1960, Jean-Michel Basquiat born at Brooklyn Hospital, New York. His father, Gerard Basquiat, born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; his mother, Matilde Andrades, born in Brooklyn of Puerto Rican parents. The Basquiats live in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Sister, Lisane, is born in Brooklyn.

At an early age, Basquiat shows an affinity for drawing, often using paper his father brings home from the accounting firm where he works to make drawings inspired by television cartoons. His mother has a strong interest in fashion design and sketching, and she frequently draws with Basquiat.

“His mother got him started and she pushed him. She was actually a very good artist” (Gerard Basquiat).

With his mother, Basquiat often visits The Brooklyn Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. His mother continues to encourage his interest in art and emphasizes the importance of education. Basquiat attends kindergarten at a Head Start Project school.

“I’d say my mother gave me all the primary things. The art came from her” (Basquiat).

The Basquiat family moves to East 35th Street in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Sister, Jeanine, is born.

Basquiat continues to make cartoonlike drawings inspired by Alfred Hitchcock films, automobiles, comic books, and the Alfred E. Newman character from Mad.

“He was always so bright, absolutely an unbelievable mind …. He drew and painted all of his life from the time he was three or four years old” (Gerard Basquiat).

In May 1969, while playing ball in the street, Basquiat is hit by an automobile. He breaks an arm, suffers various internal injuries, and has to have his spleen removed. He is hospitalized at King’s County Hospital for one month. While recovering, he receives a copy of Gray’s Anatomy from his mother. The book makes a lasting impression; its influence is found in Basquiat’s later work with anatomical drawings and prints and in the name of the band he co-founded in 1979, Gray.

Gerard and Matilde Basquiat separate. The seven-year-old Basquiat lives with his father and two sisters in East Flatbush.

Gerard Basquiat and his three children move to the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn. Basquiat leaves St. Ann’s for public school, P.S. 181, the first of many New York City public schools he will attend, including P.S. 6, 101,45, and I.S. 293.

Due to a job promotion and relocation, Gerard Basquiat moves with his three children to Mira Mar, Puerto Rico, near San Juan, where Basquiat attends an Episcopalian school.

Basquiat runs away from home, staying for a few hours at a local radio station until the employees call his father, who immediately brings him home.

”Jean-Michel did not like obedience. He gave me a lot of trouble” (Gerard Basquiat)

On Thanksgiving Day, after a job transfer, Gerard Basquiat and his three children return from Puerto Rico to live in their Boerum Hill brownstone. Basquiat resumes schooling at Edward R. Murrow High School.

After a few weeks, he transfers to the City-as-School, a progressive school in Manhattan. Part of the New York City public school system, the City-as-School is an alternative high school where work-study internships are accepted as credit toward a high school degree. Designed for gifted and talented children who find the traditional educational process difficult, it is based on John Dewey’s theory that students learn by doing. At City-as- School, Basquiat meets Al Diaz, a graffitist from the Jacob Riis Projects on the Lower East Side; they become close friends and early artistic collaborators.

In December, Basquiat again runs away, this time for about two weeks, hanging out in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, a place he and Diaz would often frequent. After much searching, Gerard Basquiat finds him and brings him home. Basquiat proclaims, “Papa, I will be very, very famous one day.

“I left home at 15, and went to Washington Square Park. I just sat there dropping acid …. Now that all seems boring; it eats your mind up” (Basquiat)

Through the City-as-School, Basquiat becomes involved with an Upper West Side drama group called Family Life Theater. During this time, he creates a fictional character named SAMO (Same Old Shit), who makes a living selling a fake religion. Basquiat and Diaz, among the most popular students at City-as-School, both very creative and with a knack for getting into a lot of trouble, begin collaborating on the SAMO project as “a way of letting off steam.”

They begin spray-painting aphorisms on the D train of the IND line and around lower Manhattan. The writings consist of witty philosophical poems: SAMO as an end to mindwash religion nowhere politics, and bogus philosophy,” “SAMO saves idiots, Plush safe he think; SAMO.

Basquiat and Diaz used this form of expression to share their opinions with the world and to release any anger they had bottled up. Ultimately, this is what kick-started Basquiat’s artistic career.

As an African American, Basquiat struggled to get recognition. However, he never let that slow him down. Often, Basquiat would use his race to influence his work. Critiques say that, “Basquiat’s work was ride with imagery commenting on race relations in America, and drawing from the culture of the African Diaspora”. Because this was the base for much of his work, his paintings became very appealing to the public. At the start of his career, Basquiat met one of the most influential artists of the time, Andy Warhol, and they became fast friends. Warhol was known for leading the “Pop Art” movement, and helped Basquiat start his own type of art movement. As Basquiat gained fame, “His rise coincided with the emergence of a new art movement, Neo-Expressionism”. This truly helped Basquiat find his place in the art community, and it was with the help of Warhol. Together, Basquiat and Warhol exhibited their work nationwide, and eventually, Warhol helped Basquiat gain international recognition and thrusted him into the spotlight.

What made Basquiat so unique and successful was his style of simplicity and abstractness. Many of his paintings appeared to be childish scribbles, but at second glance, his work was actually more than met the eye. His paintings displayed his feelings, his struggles, his loves, and any other ideas that came to mind. Basquiat would even create some of his pieces on random items he found on the street, like refrigerators, doors, tires, and boxes. Robert Del Naja, an artist who had the pleasure of knowing Basquiat, said that “He made the possibilities seem limitless. His style was not something you could copy” . Basquiat has incredible amount of originality, and much like his friend, Warhol, did not care what others thought of his work; his work simply could not be replicated. In several of his works, he incorporated a three-pronged crown, which quickly became a symbol of recognition. This sense of uniqueness gave put him in high standing and is what made more and more people grow interested in his art. But unfortunately, with fame comes fortune, and with fortune can sometimes come addiction.

When Basquiat started showing his work internationally, he began to make millions; with all of that extra cash that he never had before in his life, he thought he could spend it on drugs. Basquiat quickly became addicted to cocaine and heroin and openly admitted to his drug abuse, “I had some money; I made the best paintings ever. I was completely reclusive, worked a lot, took a lot of drugs. I was awful to people” . Sadly, instead of investing his money, he spent too much of it on drugs, mainly because he had never had this much money before and saw these drugs as a delicacy, and therefore thought it was okay to treat others poorly.

In 1984, Basquiat’s drug use escalated to a point where his friends became greatly concerned and feared for his career. He began showing up to his exhibits appearing sloppy and under the influence, and was often rude to those interested in purchasing his pieces. According to an article in the New York Times, Basquiat “gained notoriety for once dumping a bowl of fruit and nuts on a dealer's head, and destroying a series of paintings that another dealer, Ms. Nosei, had wished to sell” (Jean Michel Basquiat: Hazards Of Sudden Success and Fame). His problem was spinning wildly out of control as he was becoming more disruptive, and his career was beginning to take a turn. At one point, Basquiat fled to Hawaii for a little while, attempting to fix his addiction. Upon his return, he was only slightly better, but things truly took a turn for him when his good friend, Andy Warhol, passed away in February 1987.|

After Andy’s passing, Basquiat became extremely depressed. His feelings of sadness began to show in his work, and many of his pieces depicted this sadness, but also darkness and death. Donald Rubell, someone close to both Warhol and Basquiat, saw Basquiat taking a turn for the worst and knew that things would not end well for Basquiat after Warhol’s death:

The death of Warhol made the death of Basquiat inevitable, somehow Warhol was the one person that always seemed to be able to bring Jean-Michel back from the edge. Always when Jean-Michel was in the most trouble it seemed that Andy Warhol was the person who he would approach… After Andy was gone there was no one that Jean-Michel was in such awe of that he would respond to

Just like Rubell anticipated, Basquiat died of a heroin overdose on August 12, 1988 at age twenty seven. Basquiat found it a bigger struggle each day that passed, and eventually, he just could not live without Andy anymore, and found no reason to continue living at all; he had slipped through the cracks too quickly for anyone to try and help him before it was too late.

Even though he died at a young age, and his career was not as long as most, Basquiat made a massive impact on the art community and he accomplished so much in such a short period of time. Basquiat’s legacy still lives on through the art he left behind. Many of his pieces sell for a few hundred thousand, while others are on display in museums, like the MoMA, and galleries across the globe. Jean-Michel Basquiat will forever be known for his simple, abstract, and unique work that revolutionized art in the 1970s and 1980s. He will forever be renowned as one of the first African American’s to gain international recognition for his work. Basquiat is also memorialized in film format; “Basquiat” is a movie based on his life, and “Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child” is a documentary released by PBS containing exclusive interviews with Basquiat and many of his close friends, while also highlighting his life and successful career. His death might have been tragic, but his life was incredible.