Interesting Facts About Jean Michel Basquiat
Jean Michel Basquiat began as a teenage graffiti poet, became the first Black American painter to reach superstardom, and was dead at 27.
Here are the facts behind one of the most extraordinary lives in modern art.
He started as SAMO
As a teenager Basquiat and his friend Al Diaz spray painted cryptic, witty slogans around downtown New York signed SAMO, short for same old.
The phrases got the city talking before anyone knew who was behind them, an early sign of his gift for words as much as images.
The book that shaped him
As a child, after a car accident, his mother gave him a copy of the medical textbook Gray's Anatomy to read in hospital.
Its diagrams of bones and organs stayed with him, and skeletons, skulls and inner anatomy run all through his later paintings.
The crown and the collaborations
His trademark was a three pointed crown, which he placed over figures to make them kings and heroes, often honouring Black athletes and musicians.
He became close to Andy Warhol, and the two made paintings together, a meeting of the biggest art star of one generation and the next.
From park benches to fame
Basquiat dropped out of school and for a time slept on friends couches and park benches, selling hand painted postcards and T shirts to get by. He briefly dated Madonna before she was famous, and appeared in a Blondie music video.
Of Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage, he spoke Spanish and French as well as English, and wove words from all of them into his paintings, treating language as another kind of paint.
Quick facts about Basquiat
What does SAMO mean?
Same old, his teenage graffiti tag.
Why skulls and bones?
Partly from the Gray's Anatomy book he read as a child.
What is his symbol?
A three pointed crown.
How high have his prices gone?
One painting sold for over a hundred and ten million dollars in 2017.
The kid who became a king
Basquiat turned the language of the street into museum art and broke open a world that had almost no room for a young Black painter, all before he turned thirty. The full story is in the Basquiat guide.