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 show more 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. show less

Jean-Michel Basquiat, artist and art world provocateur, took New York City by storm with his powerful and complex works that relentlessly engaged with charged sociopolitical issues, including race, police brutality, and structural inequity. In this important volume, devoted to an exhibition at the Brant Foundation in their newly opened Manhattan outpost featuring the artist's key works, Basquiat's art returns to its East Village roots, contextualized for the first time in decades in the very show more neighborhood that served as one of his greatest inspirations.

Dieter Buchhart, noted Basquiat scholar and curator, brings together one hundred of the artist's most important works, focusing on the best examples of the many subjects that informed Basquiat's work, from jazz, anatomy, sports figures, comics, classical literature, the African diaspora, and art history. The exhibition partially restages three of the artist's critical early shows, including an exhibition of the artist's paintings and drawings of heads at Robert Miller Gallery; his most important canvases from Gagosian Gallery's 1982 show in Los Angeles; and Basquiat's solo show at Fun Gallery in the East Village. Buchhart also considers in-depth the artist's so-called stretcher bar paintings, in which the normally hidden wooden supports for stretched canvases are exposed, works that have yet to be explored at length by scholars. In so doing, Buchhart offers a critical assessment of the enduring importance and legacy of the artist's work. show less

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 show more 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 show less

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 show more 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. show less