🇺🇸Jean-Michel
Basquiat

He was sleeping in a cardboard box in Tompkins Square Park, and he was selling hand-painted postcards for two dollars each to tourists who wandered through SoHo, and he was seventeen years old. Brooklyn-born Jean-Michel Basquiat had left his father's house after a final argument that turned violent, and he had landed in downtown Manhattan in 1977, during the last gasp of New York's near-bankruptcy, when the city was both terrifying and electrically alive. The streets of the Lower East Side were where the future of American art was being made, and he walked into them carrying nothing but the knowledge, acquired at six from a copy of Gray's Anatomy his mother had given him in hospital after a car accident, of how the human body is put together beneath the skin.

He had grown up between worlds. His father, Gérard Basquiat, was Haitian. His mother, Matilde, was Puerto Rican, born in Brooklyn. They had spoken French and Spanish at home; Jean-Michel had absorbed both alongside English, had read voraciously, had haunted the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art with the intensity of someone taking inventory. He was tested as a gifted child and admitted to Brooklyn's progressive City-As-School program. He was brilliant in a way that did not fit the available forms. By seventeen, he had stopped trying to make it fit, and he was sleeping outside.

In 1978, working with his friend Al Diaz, he began writing cryptic messages across lower Manhattan under the tag SAMO© — an abbreviation of "same old shit." The messages were not typical graffiti. They were gnomic, philosophical, self-aware: critiques of consumerism and race and art-world pretension delivered in the visual language of the street. They attracted attention from the downtown art scene, from critics and curators who found them intellectually interesting in ways most street writing was not. The Village Voice wrote about them. People began to want to know who was behind them.

The ascent that followed was one of the most compressed in art history. In 1980, at nineteen, he appeared in a group show at PS1. In 1981, at twenty, he had his first solo gallery show. In 1982, at twenty-one, he was invited to exhibit at Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany — one of the most prestigious venues in contemporary art — alongside artists with decades of careers behind them. The same year, he was profiled in Artforum. He was painting on found doors, wooden pallets, refrigerators, anything that came to hand, covering surfaces with figures, words, crowns, anatomical diagrams, crossed-out words, skull-like faces rendered with urgent, aggressive line. The work was unlike anything the art market had seen: raw and learned simultaneously, steeped in Black history and coded in high-art references, by turns furious and tender.

Andy Warhol became his friend and collaborator. Galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Tokyo, and Zurich competed for his work. By twenty-two he was wealthy, living in a building he had previously slept outside of. He bought it. The velocity of his rise was matched by the velocity of his self-destruction — the heroin habit that his dealers and gallery owners occasionally seemed to accommodate, the isolation that wealth and fame produced. He made thousands of works between 1980 and 1988. He died of a heroin overdose on August 12, 1988, in his Great Jones Street studio. He was twenty-seven years old.

The market for his work has only accelerated since his death. In May 2017, his 1982 painting "Untitled" — a skull-like head on a field of yellow — sold at Sotheby's New York for $110.5 million, breaking the record for an American artist at auction. His works now hang in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, and museums across Europe and Asia. He left behind a body of work that has become essential to understanding the 1980s, race in America, the relationship between street culture and institutional art, and what it looks like when a person of extraordinary intelligence is given almost no time at all.