Jean Michel Basquiat Bio/Wiki, Net Worth, Married 2018
Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) was an American artist, musician and producer. Basquiat first achieved notoriety as part of SAMO, an informal graffiti group who wrote enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City during the late 1970s where the hip hop, post-punk and street art movements had coalesced. By the 1980s he was exhibiting his Neo-expressionist and Primitivist paintings in galleries and museums internationally. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his art in 1992.Basquiat's art focused on "suggestive 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 and figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique.Basquiat used social commentary in his paintings as a "springboard to deeper truths about the individual", as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism, while his poetics were acutely political and direct in their criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle.
December 22, 1960, Brooklyn, New York City, New York, United States
Died
August 12, 1988, NoHo, Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States
Place Of Birth
Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
Height
6' 0½" (1.84 m)
Profession
Soundtrack
Education
Edward R. Murrow High School
Nationality
American
Parents
Matilda Andrades, Gerard Basquiat
Siblings
Lisane Basquiat, Jeanine Basquiat, Max Basquiat
Star Sign
Capricorn
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Fact
1
Chosen by GQ magazine as one of the 50 most stylish men of the past 50 years.
2
Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Volume Two, 1986-1990, pages 71-72. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999.
3
Biography in: "American National Biography". Supplement 1, pp. 30-32. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
4
Was of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent.
5
The movie Basquiat (1996) starring Jeffrey Wright is a biopic of his discovery by Andy Warhol, their intense friendship, the racism he endured in the art world, and the drug habit that eventually killed him.
6
In 1977, he and his friend Al Diaz began spray painting subway walls with cryptic sayings, always signing them "SAMO" ("Same Old Shit"). He always said SAMO was an end to mindwash religion, nowhere politics and bogus philosophy. His idea was to write anti-materialism in plain view of some of the worst materialists around. Painted on unconventional objects retrieved from the junkyard, he seemed to be attacking bourgeois society.