Jean-Michel Basquiat There is hardly a name so closely linked with the transition of street art into a high-art context than of Jean-Michel Basquiat. And the term shooting star applied to hardly any other artist as it did to him, especially concerning the speed of his public recognition and the brevity of his artistic career. His style – expressive, spontaneus and raw – injected art at the beginning of the 1980s with a freshness that even rejuvenated the older Andy Warhol. As a result the two men, Warhol and Basquiat, worked together on a series of joint projects in 1984 and 1985. Although he was self-taught, frequent visits to museums had made Basquiat completely familiar with the history of art. He was the first to combine elements of cubism, abstract expressionism, Art Brut and Arte Povera with graffiti, comic strips and tribalistic images.Perhaps the rise of hip-hop culture played no small part in this: Basquiat loosely belonged to the scene and motifs from hip-hop iconography such as crowns repeatedly appear in his work. And just as hip-hop DJs combine elements from jazz, soul, funk and disco, Basquiats harked back to various stylistic elements and merged them to present a new iconography of New York urbanity. His origins in graffiti remained in a fondness for script throughout many of his paintings. Not a few works consist of lists of workds or names – for example the lists of players on jazz records. The word defeine the shape of the picture surface as graphic value at the same time place it in urban space and history. Julian Schnabel portrayed the artist, his way of working and his death from a drug overdose at the young age of 27 in his film Basquiat (1996).
Posted on: Wed, 26 Feb 2014 10:26:51 +0000
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