Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1960. His father,
Gerard, was an accountant. And like many American boys, Jean-Michel drew
cartoons and avidly read MAD Magazine. These details seem quite plain. So
what made Basquiat’s life so unusual and his artwork so highly esteemed? For
starters, Basquiat was a black artist within an almost exclusively white art
world. However, blackness did not make Basquiat famous; his work commanded
attention on its own. In fact, even his graffiti stood out from the countless
scrawls on the streets of Manhattan, evident when The Village Voice
offered a $100 reward for information to help identify the man behind the tag, "SAMO."
Exactly what made Basquiat one of the most revered artists of the twentieth
century is hard to pinpoint. While some argue that he was a true genius, others
would retort that Basquiat merely got lucky as a product of the times. But it is
hard to believe that he owed everything to luck.
Although Basquiat did not receive classical training in art, in many ways his
life indicates that he was a natural artist. Basquiat’s mother, Matilde,
introduced him to art at an early age. She took him to New York’s museums and
theaters, and he learned to draw from the books she bought him, such as
Gray’s Anatomy. Basquiat had trouble tolerating those who were less
intelligent than he was (most notably his teachers), and he never graduated from
high school. For a while, he attended "City-As-School" (CAS), a program designed
to use the city’s vast array of cultural assets (museums, planetariums, etc.) to
teach smart kids who had struggled at traditional schools.
As a student in the CAS program, Basquiat gave birth to an idea that led to his
first taste of fame. One night in 1978, after smoking pot with friend Al Diaz in
the CAS student lounge, Jean-Michel came up with the idea of "SAMO." Standing
for "same old shit," SAMO represented a conceptual religion that you could buy
in packets, like a drug. Basquiat, Diaz, and other friends made up all sorts of
details for SAMO (such as a weekly ceremony in which a Samoid priest placed yarn
on a person’s closed eyes, thus literally "pulling the wool over your eyes"),
and they began creating SAMO propaganda. They drew cartoons and wrote essays
about SAMO for the CAS student paper, though the most important aspect of SAMO
was the propagandistic graffiti.
Basquiat and Diaz took ink markers and spray paint to cover the streets with
their SAMO graffiti. They wrote somewhat cryptic and poetic sentence fragments
all over lower Manhattan’s art districts, signing each tag, "SAMO©." The
graffiti caught people’s attention. On December 11, 1978, The Village Voice
printed an article on SAMO and offered the $100 reward described above. However,
SAMO merely represented a starting point in Basquiat’s artistic career. When
Basquiat and Diaz had a falling out, Basquiat marked the end of their
collaboration by writing, "SAMO© IS DEAD."
After the initial attention surrounding SAMO, Basquiat publicly exhibited his
work for the first time in 1980 at the "The Times Square Show." There,
Jean-Michel created a large installation piece and signed it "SAMO." Of the many
artists featured in the show, Basquiat was one of the few individuals mentioned
in the Art in America review, which noted: "A patch of wall by SAMO, the
omnipresent graffiti sloganeer, was a knock-out combination of de Kooning and
subway spray-paint scribbles."
The success of "The Times Square Show" led to a subsequent show entitled, "New
York/New Wave." This period marked the beginning of a rising, though often
debated artistic movement referred to by some critics as "punk art" and by
others as "neo-pop." After arriving at the show space ahead of time, Basquiat
painted on a large piece of metal in a style more evolved than that of SAMO but
still distant from the neo-expressionism for which he would ultimately became
famous. The show’s organizer, Diego Cortez, decided that Basquiat was one of the
few artists whose work deserved an entire room. For the exhibition, Jean-Michel
painted fifteen pieces, some on canvas and others on pieces of wood and foam,
with images of automobiles, human heads, masks, cityscapes, cartoon characters,
and the types of sentence fragments that SAMO had made so celebrated. By the end
of the show, Basquiat sold one piece for $2,500.
By 1981, Basquiat had arrived on the big-time art scene. That year, he flew to
Italy to do his first European exhibition. Upon returning to New York, he signed
on with his first full-time dealer, Annina Nosei. As part of the arrangement,
Nosei cleared out the basement of her gallery for Basquiat to use as a studio,
though this arrangement led to a series of conflicts between the two. As
Basquiat worked in her basement, Nosei would disrupt him by bringing down
clients. In addition, she sold paintings that were not even finished.
Eventually, these differences led to the end of their partnership. After leaving
Nosei, Basquiat went through at least a half-dozen galleries and dealers, and he
had problems with almost all of them.
These problems notwithstanding, Jean-Michel Basquiat was officially a star of
the art world. Rene Ricard’s article on Basquiat, "The Radiant Child," was
published in the December 1981 issue of Artforum, and Basquiat’s
paintings began to fetch at least $5,000-$10,000 apiece. In addition to boosting
Basquiat’s name recognition, Ricard also introduced the new art star to Andy
Warhol, whom Basquiat had deeply revered. In 1983, Basquiat became the youngest
artist ever featured in the Whitney Museum’s esteemed Biennial Exhibition. One
year later, Basquiat and Warhol began to collaborate artistically on several
works. Though critics largely derided these collaborations, Basquiat’s appeal
remained strong, with the New York Times Magazine featuring Basquiat on
its cover in 1995.
During this seemingly unstoppable success, however, Basquiat developed an
increasing dependence on drugs. Besides smoking pounds of marijuana, Basquiat
used cocaine and heroin extensively. He also became fixated on celebrities such
as John Belushi, who had died of drug overdoses. In 1988, at the age of 27,
Basquiat ultimately met the same form of death. The autopsy report reads that he
died of "acute mixed drug intoxication (opiates-cocaine)." His estate was valued
at over $3,800,000.
In 1992, the Whitney Museum and Madonna put together the funds to hold a
retrospective exhibition of the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat. While many
critics, including Yale art historian Robert Farris Thompson, declared
Basquiat’s paintings "true masterpieces", others dismissed the importance of
Basquiat’s art. Writer/critic Robert Hughes called the retrospective a "parody
of a funeral rite, performed over a slender talent encased in a sarcophagus
grossly too large for it. ... The life was so sad and truncated, and the art
that came out of it so limited, that it seems unfair to dwell on either." While
art critics will undoubtedly continue debating Basquiat’s place within the
twentieth century canon, Basquiat possessed enough genius to achieve fame,
wealth, and recognition within the overall tradition of art history. And perhaps
more importantly, he left a body of work that never ceases to provoke and
fascinate viewers.
In the late seventies, brief, cryptic messages began to appear on the streets of Manhattan, all signed SAMO. These subversive, sometimes menacing statements "PLAYING ART WITH DADDY'S MONEY" "9 TO 5 CLONE" "PLUSH SAFE ... HE THINK" piqued the curiosity of viewers around New York and soon gained notoriety in the art world.
SAMO, a tag calling up associations like "Sambo," Samson," or "Same Old Shit", remained anonymous for some time. Eventually, it became known that the author of SAMO's poetic defacements was Jean Michel Basquiat, with Al Diaz as his partner.
Born in Brooklyn to middle class Haitian and Puerto Rican parents, Basquiat left home while a teenager to live in lower Manhattan, take drugs, and play in a noise band, supporting himself with odd jobs. Around 1980, Basquiat's work began to attract attention from the art world, particularly after a group of artists from the punk and graffiti underground held the "Times Square Show" in an abandoned massage parlor. A wall covered with spray painting and brushwork by SAMO received favorable notices in the press, and Basquiat began to sell his paintings out of his tenement apartment. Within a year or two, Basquiat was well known throughout the art world, though SAMO graffiti appeared less and less often. Eventually, a few black marker messages inscribed around town announced "SAMO is dead." Jean Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose on August 12, 1988.
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