251,504 views | Richard Reeves • TED2023

While studying inequality and social mobility, Richard Reeves made a surprising discovery: in some countries, like the US and UK, boys are drastically lagging behind girls across many academic measures. He explains why these struggles in school are indicative of the larger crises facing boys and men — and outlines how society could thoughtfully tackle these challenges to work towards a more inclusive, equitable future. (Followed by a Q&A with head of TED Chris Anderson)

About the speaker

Richard Reeves

Social mobility scholarSee speaker profile

A scholar with a passion for social progress, Richard Reeves is tackling the complex and urgent crisis of boyhood and manhood.

The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot

Russell Kirk

“It is inconceivable even to imagine, let alone hope for, a dominant conservative movement in America without Kirk’s labor.” — William F. Buckley, Jr.

Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind is one of the greatest contributions to twentieth-century American conservatism. Brilliant in every respect, from its conception to its choice of significant figures representing the history of intellectual conservatism, The Conservative Mind launched the modern American Conservative Movement when it was first published in 1953 and has become an enduring classic of political thought.

The seventh revised edition features the complete text and an introduction by publisher Henry Regency.

A must-read.

(Goodreads.com)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jean-Michel Basquiat
Basquiat by Andy Warhol in 1982
Born	December 22, 1960 New York City, U.S.
Died	August 12, 1988 (aged 27) New York City, U.S.
Cause of death	Heroin overdose
Resting place	Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York City
Years active	1978–1988
Known for	Painting, drawing
Notable work	Irony of Negro Policeman (1981)Untitled (Skull) (1981)Untitled (1982)Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump (1982)Defacement (1983)Hollywood Africans (1983)
Style	Neo-expressionismGraffitistreet art
Movement	Neo-expressionism
Website	basquiat.com

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

Basquiat first achieved fame as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, alongside Al Diaz, writing enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of Manhattan‘s Lower East Side during the late 1970s, where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop music 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 was 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 appropriated 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. His visual poetics were acutely political and direct in their criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle.

Since his death at the age of 27 in 1988, Basquiat’s 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.

Biography

Early life: 1960–1977

Basquiat was born on December 22, 1960, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York City, the second of four children to Matilde Basquiat (née Andrades, 1934–2008) and Gérard Basquiat (1930–2013).^[1] He had an older brother, Max, who died shortly before his birth, and two younger sisters, Lisane (b. 1964) and Jeanine (b. 1967).^[2][3] His father was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and his mother was born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents.^[4] He was raised Catholic.^[5]

Matilde instilled a love for art in her young son by taking him to local art museums and enrolling him as a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum of Art.^[1][6] Basquiat was a precocious child who learned to read and write by the age of four.^[7] His mother encouraged her son’s artistic talent and he often tried to draw his favorite cartoons.^[8] In 1967, he started attending Saint Ann’s School, a private school.^[9][10] There he met his friend Marc Prozzo and together they created a children’s book, written by Basquiat at the age of seven and illustrated by Prozzo.^[8][11]

In 1968, Basquiat was hit by a car while playing in the street at the age of seven.^[12] His arm was broken and he suffered several internal injuries, which required a splenectomy.^[13] While he was hospitalized, his mother brought him a copy of Gray’s Anatomy to keep him occupied.^[14] After his parents separated that year, Basquiat and his sisters were raised by their father.^[1][14] His mother was committed to a psychiatric hospital when he was ten and thereafter spent her life in and out of institutions.^[15] By the age of eleven, Basquiat was fluent in French, Spanish and English, and an avid reader of all three languages.^[16]

Basquiat’s family resided in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Boerum Hill and then in 1974, moved to Miramar, Puerto Rico.^[17][18] When they returned to Brooklyn in 1976, Basquiat attended Edward R. Murrow High School.^[19] He struggled to deal with his mother’s instability and rebelled as a teenager.^[20] He ran away from home at 15 when his father caught him smoking pot in his room.^[21][1][14] He slept on park benches at Washington Square Park and took acid.^[22][23] Eventually, his father spotted him with a shaved head and called the police to bring him home.^[24]

In the 10th grade, he enrolled at City-As-School, an alternative high school in Manhattan, home to many artistic students who found conventional schooling difficult.^[9] He would skip school with his friends, but still received encouragement from his teachers, and began to write and illustrate for the school newspaper.^[25] He developed the character SAMO to endorse a faux religion.^[26] The saying “SAMO” had started as a private joke between Basquiat and his schoolmate Al Diaz, as an abbreviation for the phrase “Same old shit.”^[25] They drew a series of cartoons for their school paper before and after using SAMO©.^[27]

Street art and Gray: 1978–1980

SAMO (for “same old”) marked the witty sayings of a precocious and worldly teenage mind that, even at that early juncture, saw the world in shades of gray, fearlessly juxtaposing corporate commodity structures with the social milieu he wished to enter: the predominantly white art world.

—Franklin Sirmans, In the Cipher: Basquiat and Hip Hop Culture^[28]

In May 1978, Basquiat and Diaz began spray painting graffiti on buildings in Lower Manhattan.^[27][29] Working under the pseudonym SAMO, they inscribed poetic and satirical advertising slogans such as “SAMO© AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO GOD.”^[27] In June 1978, Basquiat was expelled from City-As-School for pieing the principal.^[30] At 17, his father kicked him out of the house when he decided to drop out of school.^[31] He worked for the Unique Clothing Warehouse in NoHo while continuing to create graffiti at night.^[32][33] On December 11, 1978, The Village Voice published an article about the SAMO graffiti.^[27]

In 1979, Basquiat appeared on the live public-access television show TV Party hosted by Glenn O’Brien.^[34] Basquiat and O’Brien formed a friendship and he made regular appearances on the show over the next few years.^[34] Eventually, he began spending time writing graffiti around the School of Visual Arts, where he befriended students John Sex, Kenny Scharf, and Keith Haring.^[35]

In April 1979, Basquiat met Michael Holman at the Canal Zone Party and they founded the noise rock band Test Pattern, which was later renamed Gray.^[36] Other members of Gray included Shannon Dawson, Nick Taylor, Wayne Clifford and Vincent Gallo. They performed at nightclubs such as Max’s Kansas City, CBGB, Hurrah and the Mudd Club.^[36]

Around this time, Basquiat lived in the East Village with his friend Alexis Adler, a Barnard biology graduate.^[37] He often copied diagrams of chemical compounds borrowed from Adler’s science textbooks. She documented Basquiat’s creative explorations as he transformed the floors, walls, doors and furniture into his artworks.^[38] He also made postcards with his friend Jennifer Stein.^[39] While selling postcards in SoHo, Basquiat spotted Andy Warhol at W.P.A. restaurant with art critic Henry Geldzahler.^[14] He sold Warhol a postcard titled Stupid Games, Bad Ideas.^[40]

SAMO Xerox poster (1979)

In October 1979, at Arleen Schloss‘s open space called A’s, Basquiat showed his SAMO montages using color Xerox copies of his works.^[41] Schloss allowed Basquiat to use the space to create his “MAN MADE” clothing, which were painted upcycled garments.^[42][43] In November 1979, costume designer Patricia Field carried his clothing line in her upscale boutique on 8th Street in the East Village. Field also displayed his sculptures in the store window.^[44]

When Basquiat and Diaz had a falling out, he inscribed “SAMO IS DEAD” on the walls of SoHo buildings in 1980.^[45] In June 1980, he appeared in High Times magazine, his first national publication, as part of an article titled “Graffiti ’80: The State of the Outlaw Art” by Glenn O’Brien.^[46] Later that year, he began filming O’Brien’s independent film Downtown 81 (2000), originally titled New York Beat, which featured some of Gray’s recordings on its soundtrack.^[47]

Rise to fame and success: 1980–1986

In June 1980, Basquiat participated in The Times Square Show, a multi-artist exhibition sponsored by Collaborative Projects Incorporated (Colab) and Fashion Moda.^[48] He was noticed by various critics and curators, including Jeffrey Deitch, who mentioned him in an article titled “Report from Times Square” in the September 1980 issue of Art in America.^[49][50] In February 1981, Basquiat participated in the New York/New Wave exhibition, curated by Diego Cortez at New York’s P.S.1.^[51] Italian artist Sandro Chia recommended Basquiat’s work to Italian dealer Emilio Mazzoli, who promptly bought 10 paintings for Basquiat to have a show at his gallery in Modena, Italy in May 1981.^[23][52] In December 1981, art critic Rene Ricard published “The Radiant Child” in Artforum magazine, the first extensive article on Basquiat.^[53] During this period, Basquiat painted many pieces on objects he found in the streets, such as discarded doors.^[54]

Basquiat sold his first painting, Cadillac Moon (1981), to Debbie Harry, lead singer of the punk rock band Blondie, for $200 after they had filmed Downtown 81 together.^[55] He also appeared as a disc jockey in the 1981 Blondie music video “Rapture“, a role originally intended for Grandmaster Flash.^[56] At the time, Basquiat was living with his girlfriend, Suzanne Mallouk, who financially supported him as a waitress.^[20]

In September 1981, art dealer Annina Nosei invited Basquiat to join her gallery at the suggestion of Sandro Chia.^[23] Soon after, he participated in her group show Public Address.^[57] She provided him with materials and a space to work in the basement of her gallery.^[30] In 1982, Nosei arranged for him to move into a loft which also served as a studio at 101 Crosby Street in SoHo.^[58][59] He had his first American one-man show at the Annina Nosei Gallery in March 1982.^[30] He also painted in Modena for his second Italian exhibition in March 1982.^[60] Feeling exploited, that show was canceled because he was expected to make eight paintings in one week.^[23]

By the summer of 1982, Basquiat had left the Annina Nosei Gallery and gallerist Bruno Bischofberger became his worldwide art dealer.^[61] In June 1982, at 21, Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever take part in Documenta in Kassel, Germany.^[31] His works were exhibited alongside Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol.^[62] Bischofberger gave Basquiat a one-man show at his Zurich gallery in September 1982, and arranged for him to meet Warhol for lunch on October 4, 1982.^[63] Warhol recalled, “I took a Polaroid and he went home and within two hours a painting was back, still wet, of him and me together.”^[64] The painting, Dos Cabezas (1982), ignited a friendship between them.^[65] Basquiat was photographed by James Van Der Zee for an interview with Henry Geldzahler published in the January 1983 issue of Warhol’s Interview magazine.^[66]

From 1983 to 1988 Basquiat lived at 57 Great Jones Street in NoHo, where he died. A plaque commemorating his life was placed outside the building in 2016.

In November 1982, Basquiat’s solo exhibition opened at the Fun Gallery in the East Village.^[67] Among the works exhibited were A Panel of Experts (1982) and Equals Pi (1982).^[68] In early December 1982,^[69] Basquiat began working at the studio space art dealer Larry Gagosian had built below his Venice, California home.^[70] There, he commenced a series of paintings for a March 1983 show, his second at the Gagosian Gallery in West Hollywood.^[70] He was accompanied by his girlfriend, then-unknown singer Madonna.^[71] Gagosian recalled: “Everything was going along fine. Jean-Michel was making paintings, I was selling them, and we were having a lot of fun. But then one day Jean-Michel said, ‘My girlfriend is coming to stay with me.’ … So I said, ‘Well, what’s she like?’ And he said, ‘Her name is Madonna and she’s going to be huge.’ I’ll never forget that he said that.”^[72]

Basquiat took considerable interest in the work that artist Robert Rauschenberg was producing at Gemini G.E.L. in West Hollywood.^[70] He visited him on several occasions and found inspiration in his accomplishments.^[70] While in Los Angeles, Basquiat painted Hollywood Africans (1983), which portrays him with graffiti artists Toxic and Rammellzee.^[73] He often painted portraits of other graffiti artists—and sometimes collaborators—in works such as Portrait of A-One A.K.A. King (1982), Toxic (1984), and ERO (1984).^[74] In 1983, he produced the hip-hop record “Beat Bop” featuring Rammellzee and rapper K-Rob.^[75] It was pressed in limited quantities on his Tartown Inc. imprint. He created the cover art for the single, making it highly desirable among both record and art collectors.^[76]

Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Bruno Bischofberger, and Francesco Clemente in 1984

In March 1983, at 22 years old, Basquiat became one of the youngest artists to participate in the Whitney Biennial exhibition of contemporary art.^[77][78] Paige Powell, an associate publisher for Interview magazine, organized a show of his work at her friend’s New York apartment in April 1983.^[79][80] Shortly after, he began a relationship with Powell, who was instrumental in fostering his friendship with Warhol.^[77] In August 1983, Basquiat moved into a loft owned by Warhol at 57 Great Jones Street in NoHo, which also served as a studio.^[81]

In the summer of 1983, Basquiat invited Lee Jaffe, a former musician in Bob Marley‘s band, to join him on a trip throughout Asia and Europe.^[82][83] On his return to New York, he was deeply affected by the death of Michael Stewart, an aspiring black artist in the downtown club scene who was killed by transit police in September 1983. He painted Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart) (1983) in response to the incident.^[84] He also participated in a Christmas benefit with various New York artists for the family of Michael Stewart in 1983.^[85]

Having joined the Mary Boone‘s SoHo gallery in 1983, Basquiat had his first show there in May 1984.^[86] A large number of photographs depict a collaboration between Warhol and Basquiat in 1984 and 1985.^[87] When they collaborated, Warhol would start with something very concrete or a recognizable image and then Basquiat defaced it in his animated style.^[88] They made an homage to the 1984 Summer Olympics with Olympics (1984). Other collaborations include Taxi, 45th/Broadway (1984–85) and Zenith (1985). Their joint exhibition, Paintings, at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, caused a rift in their friendship after it was panned by critics, and Basquiat was called Warhol’s “mascot”.^[64]

Basquiat often painted in expensive Armani suits and would appear in public in the same paint-splattered clothes.^[89][90] He was a regular at the Area nightclub, where he sometimes worked the turntables as a DJ for fun.^[91] He also painted murals for the Palladium nightclub in New York City.^[92] His swift rise to fame was covered in the media. He appeared on the cover of the February 10, 1985, issue of The New York Times Magazine in a feature titled “New Art, New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist”.^[23] His work appeared in GQ and Esquire, and he was interviewed for MTV‘s “Art Break” segment.^[93][94] In 1985, he walked the runway for the Comme des Garçons Spring fashion show in New York.^[95][96]

In the mid-1980s, Basquiat was earning $1.4 million a year and he was receiving lump sums of $40,000 from art dealers.^[97] Despite his success, his emotional instability continued to haunt him. “The more money Basquiat made, the more paranoid and deeply involved with drugs he became,” wrote journalist Michael Shnayerson.^[97] Basquiat’s cocaine use became so excessive that he blew a hole in his nasal septum.^[30] A friend claimed that Basquiat confessed he was on heroin in late 1980.^[30] Many of his peers speculated that his drug use was a means of coping with the demands of his newfound fame, the exploitative nature of the art industry, and the pressures of being a black man in the white-dominated art world.^[98]

For what would be his last exhibition on the West Coast, Basquiat returned to Los Angeles for his show at the Gagosian Gallery in January 1986.^[99] In February 1986, Basquiat traveled to Atlanta, Georgia for an exhibition of his drawings at Fay Gold Gallery.^[100] That month, he participated in Limelight‘s Art Against Apartheid benefit.^[101] In the summer, he had a solo exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg.^[99] He was also invited to walk the runway for Rei Kawakubo again, this time at the Comme des Garçons Homme Plus fashion show in Paris.^[102][103] In October 1986, Basquiat flew to Ivory Coast for an exhibition of his work organized by Bruno Bischofberger at the French Cultural Institute in Abidjan.^[99][104] He was accompanied by his girlfriend Jennifer Goode, who worked at his frequent hangout, Area nightclub.^[105][106] In November 1986, at 25 years old, Basquiat became the youngest artist given an exhibition at Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover, Germany.^[107]

Final years and death: 1986–1988

During their relationship, Goode began snorting heroin with Basquiat since drugs were at her disposal.^[14] “He didn’t push it on me, but it was just there and I was so naïve,” she said.^[14] In late 1986, she successfully got herself and Basquiat into a methadone program in Manhattan, but he quit after three weeks.^[108] According to Goode, he didn’t start injecting heroin until after she ended their relationship.^[14] In the last 18 months of his life, Basquiat became something of a recluse.^[98] His continued drug use is thought to have been a way of coping after the death of his friend Andy Warhol in February 1987.^[98][14]

In 1987, Basquiat had exhibitions at Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris, the Akira Ikeda Gallery in Tokyo, and the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York.^[109] He designed a Ferris wheel for André Heller‘s Luna Luna, an ephemeral amusement park in Hamburg from June to August 1987 with rides designed by renowned contemporary artists.^[110]

In January 1988, Basquiat traveled to Paris for his exhibition at the Yvon Lambert Gallery and to Düsseldorf for an exhibition at the Hans Mayer Gallery.^[111] While in Paris, he befriended Ivorian artist Ouattara Watts.^[112] They made plans to travel together to Watts’ birthplace, Korhogo, that summer.^[111] Following his exhibition at the Vrej Baghoomian Gallery in New York in April 1988, Basquiat traveled to Maui in June to withdraw from drug use.^[98][111] After returning to New York in July, Basquiat ran into Keith Haring on Broadway, who stated that this last encounter was the only time Basquiat ever discussed his drug problem with him.^[113] Glenn O’Brien also recalled Basquiat calling him and telling him he was “feeling really good.”^[114]

Despite attempts at sobriety, Basquiat died at the age of 27 of a heroin overdose at his home on Great Jones Street in Manhattan on August 12, 1988.^[30][39] He had been found unresponsive in his bedroom by his girlfriend Kelle Inman and was taken to Cabrini Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.^[115][14]

Basquiat is buried at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.^[116] A private funeral was held at Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on August 17, 1988.^[116] The funeral was attended by immediate family and close friends, including Keith Haring, Francesco Clemente, Glenn O’Brien, and Basquiat’s former girlfriend Paige Powell.^[116][114] Art dealer Jeffrey Deitch delivered a eulogy.^[49]

A public memorial was held at Saint Peter’s Church on November 3, 1988.^[117] Among the speakers was Ingrid Sischy, who as the editor of Artforum got to know Basquiat well and commissioned a number of articles that introduced his work to the wider world.^[118] Basquiat’s former girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk recited sections of A. R. Penck‘s “Poem for Basquiat” and his friend Fab 5 Freddy read a poem by Langston Hughes.^[119] The 300 guests included musicians John Lurie and Arto Lindsay, Keith Haring, poet David Shapiro, Glenn O’Brien, and members of Basquiat’s former band Gray.^[117]

In memory of the late artist, Keith Haring created the painting A Pile of Crowns for Jean-Michel Basquiat.^[120] In the obituary Haring wrote for Vogue, he stated: “He truly created a lifetime of works in ten years. Greedily, we wonder what else he might have created, what masterpieces we have been cheated out of by his death, but the fact is that he has created enough work to intrigue generations to come. Only now will people begin to understand the magnitude of his contribution”.^[121][122]

Artistry

See also: List of paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat

Basquiat’s canon revolves around single heroic figures: athletes, prophets, warriors, cops, musicians, kings and the artist himself. In these images the head is often a central focus, topped by crowns, hats, and halos. In this way the intellect is emphasized, lifted up to notice, privileged over the body and the physicality of these figures (i.e. black men) commonly represent in the world.

—Kellie Jones, Lost in Translation: Jean-Michel in the (Re)Mix^[123]

Art critic Franklin Sirmans analyzed that Basquiat appropriated poetry, drawing, and painting, and married text and image, abstraction, figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique.^[28] His social commentary were acutely political and direct in their criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle.^[28] He also explored artistic legacies from wide sources, including an interrogation of the Classical tradition.^[124] Art historian Fred Hoffman hypothesizes that the underlying of Basquiat’s self-identification as an artist was his “innate capacity to function as something like an oracle, distilling his perceptions of the outside world down to their essence and, in turn, projecting them outward through his creative act”,^[125] and that his art focused on recurrent “suggestive dichotomies” such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience.^[125]

Before his career as a painter began, Basquiat produced punk-inspired postcards for sale on the street, and became known for his political–poetical graffiti under the name of SAMO.^[40] He often drew on random objects and surfaces, including other people’s clothing.^[37] The conjunction of various media is an integral element of his art. His paintings are typically covered with codes of all kinds: words, letters, numerals, pictograms, logos, map symbols, and diagrams.^[126]

Basquiat primarily used texts as reference sources.^[127] A few of the books he used were Gray’s Anatomy, Henry Dreyfuss’ Symbol Sourcebook, Leonardo da Vinci published by Reynal & Company, and Burchard Brentjes’ African Rock Art, Flash of the Spirit by Robert Farris Thompson.^[128][129]

A middle period from late 1982 to 1985 featured multi-panel paintings and individual canvases with exposed stretcher bars, the surface dense with writing, collage and imagery. The years 1984 to 1985 were also the period of the Basquiat–Warhol collaborations.^[130]

Drawings

Basquiat drawing of the supportive art critic Rene Ricard, Untitled (Axe/Rene) (1984)

In his short but prolific career, Basquiat produced around 1,500 drawings, around 600 paintings, and many sculpture and mixed media works.^[131] He drew constantly and often used objects around him as surfaces when paper was not immediately at hand.^[132][133] Since childhood, he produced cartoon-inspired drawings when encouraged by his mother’s interest in art, and drawing became a part of his expression as an artist.^[134] He drew in many different media, most commonly ink, pencil, felt-tip or marker, and oil-stick. He sometimes used Xerox copies of fragments of his drawings to paste onto the canvases of larger paintings.^[135]

The first public showing of Basquiat’s paintings and drawings was in 1981 at the MoMA PS1 New York/New Wave exhibition. Rene Ricard’s article “Radiant Child” in Artforum magazine brought Basquiat to the attention of the art world.^[136] Basquiat immortalized Ricard in two drawings, Untitled (Axe/Rene) (1984) and René Ricard (1984).^[137]

A poet as well as an artist, words featured heavily in his drawings and paintings, with direct references to racism, slavery, the people and street scene of 1980s New York, black historical figures, famous musicians and athletes, as his notebooks and many important drawings demonstrate.^[138][139] Often Basquiat’s drawings were untitled, and as such to differentiate works a word written within the drawing is commonly in parentheses after Untitled. After Basquiat died, his estate was controlled by his father Gérard Basquiat, who also oversaw the committee which authenticated artworks, and operated from 1994 to 2012 to review over 2000 works, the majority of which were drawings.^[140]

Heroes and saints

A prominent theme in Basquiat’s work is the portrayal of historically prominent black figures, who were identified as heroes and saints. His early works often featured the iconographic depiction of crowns and halos to distinguish heroes and saints in his specially chosen pantheon.^[31] “Jean-Michel’s crown has three peaks, for his three royal lineages: the poet, the musician, the great boxing champion. Jean measured his skill against all he deemed strong, without prejudice as to their taste or age,” said his friend and artist Francesco Clemente.^[141] Reviewing Basquiat’s show at the Bilbao Guggenheim, Art Daily noted that “Basquiat’s crown is a changeable symbol: at times a halo and at others a crown of thorns, emphasizing the martyrdom that often goes hand in hand with sainthood. For Basquiat, these heroes and saints are warriors, occasionally rendered triumphant with arms raised in victory.”^[142]

Basquiat was particularly a fan of bebop and cited saxophonist Charlie Parker as a hero.^[23] He frequently referenced Parker and other jazz musicians in paintings such as Charles the First (1982) and Horn Players (1983), and King Zulu (1986).^[55] “Basquiat looked to jazz music for inspiration and for instruction, much in the same way that he looked to the modern masters of painting,” said art historian Jordana Moore Saggese.^[143]

Anatomy and heads

Untitled (Skull) (1981)

A major reference source used by Basquiat throughout his career was the book Gray’s Anatomy, which his mother had given him while he was in the hospital when he was seven.^[13] It remained influential in his depictions of human anatomy, and in its mixture of image and text as seen in Flesh and Spirit (1982–83). Art historian Olivier Berggruen situates in Basquiat’s anatomical screen prints Anatomy (1982) an assertion of vulnerability, one which “creates an aesthetic of the body as damaged, scarred, fragmented, incomplete, or torn apart, once the organic whole has disappeared. Paradoxically, it is the very act of creating these representations that conjures a positive corporeal valence between the artist and his sense of self or identity.”^[144]

Heads and skulls are significant focal points of many of Basquiat’s most seminal works.^[145] Heads in works like Untitled (Two Heads on Gold) (1982) and Philistines (1982) are reminiscent of African masks, suggesting a cultural reclamation.^[145] The skulls allude to Haitian Vodou, which is filled with skull symbolism; the paintings Red Skull (1982) and Untitled (1982) can be seen as primary examples.^[146] In reference to the potent image depicted in Untitled (Skull) (1981), art historian Fred Hoffman writes that Basquiat was likely “caught off guard, possibly even frightened, by the power and energy emanating from this unexpected image.”^[125] Further investigation by Hoffman in his book The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat reveals a deeper interest in the artist’s fascination with heads that proves an evolution in the artist’s oeuvre from one of raw power to one of more refined cognizance.^[147]

Heritage

Basquiat’s diverse cultural heritage was one of his many sources of inspiration. He often incorporated Spanish words into his artworks like Untitled (Pollo Frito) (1982) and Sabado por la Noche (1984). Basquiat’s La Hara (1981), a menacing portrait of a white police officer, combines the Nuyorican slang term for police (la jara) and the Irish surname O’Hara.^[148] The black-hatted figure that appears in his paintings The Guilt of Gold Teeth (1982) and Despues De Un Pun (1987) is believed to represent Baron Samedi, the spirit of death and resurrection in Haitian Vodou.^[149]

Basquiat has various works deriving from African-American history, namely Slave Auction (1982), Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta (1983), El Gran Espectaculo (The Nile) (1983), and Jim Crow (1986).^[150] Another painting, Irony of Negro Policeman (1981), illustrates how African-Americans have been controlled by a predominantly Caucasian society. Basquiat sought to portray that African-Americans have become complicit with the “institutionalized forms of whiteness and corrupt white regimes of power” years after the Jim Crow era had ended.^[151] This concept has been reiterated in additional Basquiat works, including Created Equal (1984).

In the essay “Lost in Translation: Jean-Michel in the (Re)Mix,” Kellie Jones posits that Basquiat’s “mischievous, complex, and neologistic side, with regard to the fashioning of modernity and the influence and effluence of black culture” are often elided by critics and viewers, and thus “lost in translation.”^[123]

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Basquiat