In 1968, Basquiat was hit by a car while playing in the street at the age of seven.

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. In 1967, he started attending Saint Ann's School, a private school. His mother encouraged her son's artistic talent and he often tried to draw his favorite cartoons. Basquiat was a precocious child who learned to read and write by the age of four. 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. His father was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and his mother was born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents. He had an older brother, Max, who died shortly before his birth, and two younger sisters, Lisane (b. Biography Early life: 1960–1977 īasquiat 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). 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. Since his death at the age of 27 in 1988, Basquiat's work has steadily increased in value. His visual poetics were acutely political and direct in their criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle. 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. He appropriated poetry, drawing, and painting, and married text and image, abstraction, figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his artwork in 1992.īasquiat's art focused on dichotomies such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. At 22, he was one of the youngest to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial in New York.

At 21, Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever take part in Documenta in Kassel, Germany. By the early 1980s, his paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. Jean-Michel Basquiat ( French pronunciation: Decem– August 12, 1988) was an American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement.īasquiat first achieved notoriety in the late 1970s as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, alongside Al Diaz, writing enigmatic epigrams all over Manhattan, particularly in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop music culture.

Dinosaur text art copy paste