Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American painter, born in Brooklyn on 22 December 1960 and dead in Manhattan at 27, on 12 August 1988. He began as the spray-painted poet SAMO, was the youngest of 176 artists at Documenta in 1982, and made around 160 paintings with Andy Warhol. People look him up for the skull, the crowns and the crossed-out words, and for the 110.5 million dollars that one skull fetched in 2017.
That skull is the best way into his story, because its price says more about the market than about the man who painted it.
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The painting is an Untitled work from 1982, made when Basquiat was in his early twenties. A private collector bought it in 1984 for 19,000 dollars. On 18 May 2017 Sotheby's in New York sold it to the Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa for 110.5 million, nearly double the 60 million it had been expected to fetch. It was the first work made after 1980 to pass 100 million dollars, and it became the most expensive work by an American artist.
A price like that comes with a familiar story: a kid off the street, untrained, touched by genius, gone too young. The record is less tidy. His mother took him to the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum, and he grew up speaking Spanish, French and English. When he left home for good in June 1978, his father said later, he was "planning to be a star." The man who painted the skull was not stumbling toward fame. He had been aiming at it for years.
Even the name that first made him known, SAMO, was not his alone. He invented it with a school friend.
What You'll Discover
What a hospital bed gave him.
Who shared his first alias.
What a dealer's cellar produced.
Why he crossed out his words.
What critics said about Warhol.
Who decides what is real.