Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now’s The Time…
Posted: February 5, 2015 Filed under: English | Tags: Black History Month Comments Off on Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now’s The Time…In conjunction with a retrospective exhibition opening this week at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Canada…
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) was a “shooting-star” phenomenon of the New York City art scene during the 1980s. In less than a decade he zoomed from teenage magic-marker-on-walls graffiti punk – from 1977 to 1980 – under the name SAMO © (Same Old Shit Copyright) with fellow high-schoolers Al Diaz, Shannon Dawson, and Matt Kelly – to major Manhattan trendy. The enigmatic poetic thoughts and slogans of SAMO found their way onto Basquiat’s canvases, and his SAMO “tagging” years in SoHo and Lower Manhattan can be viewed as a kind of early advertisement for himself as an Artist.
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One of three children born to Gérard Basquiat, from Haiti, and Matilde Andrades, Brooklyn-born but of Puerto-Rican descent, Jean-Michel’s home life was unstable, his mother being institutionalized from the time he was 11 years old, and his father banishing him from about the age of 15 after he dropped out of school following Grade 10. However, his mother’s gift to him of a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, the 1858 illustrated encylopaedia of the human body, before he was ten years old, planted in him the seed of ambition for future artistic expression.

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The late 1970s-early 1980s New York City confluence of street culture with art, via the emerging rap (later “hip-hop”) and graffiti scenes, plus his interest in a “serious” art career, helped to position Basquiat for stardom; he was, in fact, in the right place at the right time.
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Keith Haring, two and a half years older, would take the NYC graffiti phenomenon in a whole other Street Meets the PopArt World direction during the 1980s, whereas Basquiat aimed for a more painterly self-expression, fashioning a synthesis of Primitivism and Neo-Expressionism on canvas initiated through his graffiti and “tagging” origins.
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In February of 1985, Basquiat appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in a feature titled “New Art, New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist”.
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http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/08/09/specials/basquiat-mag.html
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