Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 - 1988) was an American artist born in Brooklyn, New York.

His mother was a Puerto Rican and his father of Haitian origin.

He had started as a street artist painting graffiti art and then he became a very popular and successful avant-garde artist.

His style was very original - nervous, fierce and energetic.

Basquiat´s career divides into three broad though overlapping phases:

In the earliest, from 1980 to late 1982, Basquiat used painterly gestures on canvas, most often depicting skeletal figures and mask-like faces that signal his obsession with mortality, and imagery derived from his street existence, such as automobiles, buildings, police, children's sidewalk, games and graffiti.

A middle period from late 1982 to 1985 features multipanel paintings and individual canvases with exposed stretcher bars, the surface dense with writing, collage and seemingly unrelated imagery. These works reveal a strong interest in Basquiat´s black and Hispanic identity and his identification with historical and contemporary black figures and events.

The last phase, from about 1986 to Basquiat´s death in 1988, displays a new type of figurative depiction, in a new painterly style, with different symbols, sources, and content.

He was a close friend of Andy Warhol, and the two made a number of collaborative works.

Basquiat became addicted to heroin, and died of an overdose.