Dieter Buchhart

This exciting, color-filled retrospective monograph offers new insights into Basquiat’s unique visual language and helps illuminate messages about political and social issues that feel as urgent today as they did a half-century ago.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s symbolic, complex, and often emotionally charged work made a huge impact on the 1980s downtown New York City art scene. And though his all-too-brief career ended when he died at age 27, Basquiat left behind an enormous legacy—not only in the number of works he produced, but also in the messages he encoded around political, social, racial, and cultural issues.

This exciting book shows how Basquiat used an intricate network of signs and symbols to challenge the very system that made him a darling of the art world. It traces his inspiration from cartoons, children’s drawings, and advertising as well as his own Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage; discusses the influence of African-American, African, and Aztec cultural histories; and shows how Basquiat incorporated into his work classical themes and contemporary icons—from athletes to musicians. What becomes clear is how, even as a young man, Basquiat had a profound understanding of the artist’s role in art history, and of his unique position as a young Black artist in a world of racism, suppression and social injustice.

This book helps readers decode Basquiat’s unique lingua franca, an intoxicating body of work brimming with social commentary that was in turns incisive, angry, comic, hip, and heartbreaking, and that remains powerful and meaningful today.… (mais)

The first African-American artist to attain art superstardom, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) created a huge oeuvre of drawings and paintings (Julian Schnabel recalls him once accidentally leaving a portfolio of about 2,000 drawings on a subway car) in the space of just eight years. Through his street roots in graffiti, Basquiat helped to establish new possibilities for figurative and expressionistic painting, breaking the white male stranglehold of Conceptual and Minimal art, and foreshadowing, among other tendencies, Germany's Junge Wilde movement. It was not only Basquiat's art but also the details of his biography that made his name legendary--his early years as "Samo" (his graffiti artist moniker), his friendships with Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Madonna and his tragically early death from a heroin overdose. This superbly produced retrospective publication assesses Basquiat's luminous career with commentary by, among others, Glenn O'Brien, and 160 color reproductions of the work.… (mais)

I purchased this after seeing the exhibit of the notebooks and other art n Atlanta; the show originated at the Brooklyn Museum. It took two visits to start seeing the notebook entries as originating with a poetic sensibility; I had seen him in visual terms, but not the language aspect, which shows how we put artists in boxes, even though I knew he first got noted for his graffiti. I got very excited by getting in touch with his language, and was happy to find this book, the "catalog," in the bookstore with images of both art and notebook pages for me to study at my leisure.
This is an excellent accompaniment to the show, and, if you don't get to see the show, then it works as providing an introduction to this important element of Basquiat's art.… (mais)

I saw the exhibit at the museum and I’ve been working my way through the book since then, first a friend’s copy and then a copy from the library.

My favorite piece, early in the exhibit and in the book, is an abstract painting, in black and white and red (blood?) with the caption: “Everybody knows where meat comes from It comes from the store.”

That’s the brilliance of this art, the social commentary. A lot of it was done during the AIDS crisis in NYC, so a lot of the art is about that.

As far as the art: too many penis depictions for my taste, but otherwise great fun. It has a lot of whimsy and themes of social justice. The art shines in the context of what the artist was trying to communicate, particularly his street art. Lots also re religion, war, racism, technology, capitalism, and modern times.

True political art. I admire it.

For me? Art as beauty? Some of it, yes, some of it fun, some of it likeable in context. Important work? Yes!

The art exhibit also has a biographical film which was excellent.

4 ½ stars… (mais)