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What is so special about Jean-Michel Basquiat?
Jean-Michel Basquiat gained celebrity due to both his striking art and his electrifying personality. He was fearless, creative and driven, quickly becoming a cultural icon embodying the New York City art scene of the 1980s and beyond.
Why are Basquiat paintings good?
His style was rough, energetic and extremely gestural. His paintings were also very colorful and narrative. Many of his paintings were very large, dynamic and powerful in size. A room full of them is truly a statement.
What did Basquiat art focus on?
Basquiat’s art focused on dichotomies such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. He appropriated poetry, drawing, and painting, and married text and image, abstraction, figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique.
How did Jean Michel Basquiat learn his art techniques?
Sometimes he also drew images that he found in books on anatomy or prehistoric art. His interest in art, cultivated from his childhood, made him knowledgeable about the different artistic movements and styles, which he would retrieve and mix, rather like a DJ, to create novel artistic languages.
Where did Jean-Michel Basquiat study art?
Edward R. Murrow High School
High School M560 – City As SchoolSecondary School for Journalism
Jean-Michel Basquiat/Education
Under what artistic name did Basquiat worked before he was recognized for his paintings?
SAMO
Jean-Michel Basquiat first attracted attention for his graffiti under the name “SAMO” in New York City. He sold sweatshirts and postcards featuring his artwork on the streets before his painting career took off. He collaborated with Andy Warhol in the mid-1980s, which resulted in a show of their work.
What was Jean-Michel Basquiat’s art style?
Poet, musician and graffiti prodigy, at the end of the 1970s Basquiat had perfected his pictorial style of obsessive scribbles, elusive symbols, diagrams and images of mask and skull, developed since he was 20. He was not a fan of interviews, but in one he declared: “I don’t think about art while I’m working.
How did Jean-Michel Basquiat die?
Basquiat used social commentary in his paintings as a “springboard to deeper truths about the individual”, as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism, while his poetics were acutely political and direct in their criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle. He died of a heroin overdose at his art studio at age 27.
What is the iconography of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting “the Mona Lisa”?
The painting is full of the key iconography of Basquiat, including the powerful skull heads, the three-pointed crown and the dense network of repeated textual references that recur in Basquiat’s most significant works.
Where did Basquiat’s subjects come from?
Basquiat drew his subjects from his Caribbean legacy – his father was Haitian and his mother of Puerto Rican origins – and a convergence of African American, African and Aztec cultural stories with classical themes and contemporary heroes such as athletes and musicians.