Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat ( BAH-skee-AH(T), French: [ʒɑ̃ miʃɛl baskja]; December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an American artist and painter, of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent, who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement.

Basquiat first achieved notoriety in the late 1970s as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, alongside Al Diaz, writing enigmatic epigrams all over Manhattan, particularly in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side where disco, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop culture. By the early 1980s, his paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. At 21, Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever take part in Documenta in Kassel, Germany. At 22, he became one of the youngest to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial in New York. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his artwork in 1992.

Basquiat's art focused on dichotomies such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. He incorporated poetry, drawing, and painting, and married text and image, abstraction, figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique. He used social commentary in his paintings as a tool for introspection and for identifying with his experiences in the black community, as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism.

Basquiat died at the age of 27 in 1988 of a heroin overdose. Since then, his work has steadily increased in value. In 2017, Untitled, a 1982 painting depicting a black skull with red-and-yellow rivulets, sold for a record-breaking $110.5 million, becoming one of the most expensive paintings ever purchased.