Jean-Michel Basquiat

Who

Born on 22 December 1960 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, he died of a heroin overdose in Manhattan on 12 August 1988, aged 27. He started in 1978 as half of SAMO, writing satirical graffiti slogans around Lower Manhattan with Al Diaz. By June 1982 he was showing at Documenta, aged 21, the youngest artist in it.

Why they matter

He put the street's handwriting - words, lists, crossings-out, crowns, skulls - onto canvas at full scale and made it carry history: Black athletes, jazz musicians and actors, and the narrow roles the culture offered them. Hollywood Africans, painted on a trip to Los Angeles in 1983, puts him and his friends Toxic and Rammellzee among phrases like "Sugar Cane" and "Gangsterism" that point at the few parts old Hollywood gave Black actors. His career lasted less than a decade, and in May 2017 a 1982 skull painting set his auction record when the Japanese collector Yusaku Maezawa bought it.

What to buy

Prints: his work is in copyright, so buy from a museum shop that sells licensed prints - MoMA's Design Store carries framed Basquiat prints - rather than an anonymous marketplace listing. His scrawled text and crossings-out survive reproduction better than most paintings, so even a modest print reads. Books: Taschen's Basic Art Basquiat by Leonhard Emmerling (96 pages) is the cheapest good introduction. The one to own is Taschen's big Jean-Michel Basquiat edited by Hans Werner Holzwarth with Eleanor Nairne, over 500 pages taking the career year by year through paintings, drawings and notebook pages, with his own statements and contemporary reviews. Originals: not realistic. The paintings and drawings are museum and top-auction works, and he is heavily faked. The committee that authenticated his work for the estate reviewed more than 2,000 works between 1994 and 2012 and then dissolved, so there is no longer anyone to issue a certificate; treat any "Basquiat" without a documented provenance as a fake.

Notes

He met Andy Warhol on 4 October 1982 and painted Dos Cabezas the same day; the two collaborated on paintings in 1984-85. His first solo exhibition was at the Galleria d'Arte Emilio Mazzoli in Modena in May 1981. The Whitney gave him a retrospective in 1992-93. Hollywood Africans, a gift of Douglas S. Cramer, is at the Whitney.

Story

In February 2022 the Orlando Museum of Art opened "Heroes & Monsters: Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Thaddeus Mumford, Jr. Venice Collection": 25 paintings, many on cardboard. The museum's story was that Basquiat made them in 1982 while working in Venice, California, and sold them directly to the screenwriter Thad Mumford, who kept them in a storage unit. In 2012, the story went, Mumford stopped paying for the storage unit, its contents were auctioned, and the paintings resurfaced.

There were problems. In 2017 Mumford had signed a statement saying he had never met Basquiat and never bought his work. And one painting was made on a piece of FedEx box whose label used a typeface the company did not introduce until 1994 - twelve years after the painting was supposedly made, and six years after Basquiat died.

On 24 June 2022 the FBI raided the museum and carried out all 25. Within days the museum's director was out. In 2023 a California auctioneer, Michael Barzman, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and admitted that he and an accomplice had made most of the works themselves, starting in 2012 - the very year of the storage auction - and sold them on eBay and through his own auction business, with the storage unit as their cover story.

Key works

Untitled (skull) (1982) - private collection
Dos Cabezas (1982)
Hollywood Africans (1983) - Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Who

Why they matter

What to buy

Notes

Story

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

Prints

Books

See also