Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat was born on 22 December 1960 in Brooklyn, New York, to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, both of whom encouraged his early artistic development; his mother in particular took him regularly to art museums and enrolled him as a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum by age six. A serious car accident at age seven led to a lengthy hospital recovery during which his mother gave him a copy of the medical textbook Gray's Anatomy, imagery from which would recur throughout his later artistic work.

Basquiat's home life became increasingly unstable following his parents' separation and his mother's institutionalisation for mental illness, and he left home as a teenager, eventually dropping out of high school shortly before graduation. In the mid-1970s he and a friend began spray-painting cryptic, poetic graffiti tagged 'SAMO©' (an abbreviation of 'Same Old Shit') across downtown Manhattan, gaining attention within New York's emerging street art and punk scenes for the work's distinctive blend of social commentary, wordplay and visual invention.

By the early 1980s, Basquiat transitioned from street art to painting on canvas, developing a distinctive style combining raw, expressive figuration, fragmented text, anatomical imagery, and references spanning African and Caribbean iconography, jazz and bebop history, boxing, and critiques of racism and capitalism, often incorporating a recurring crown motif that came to symbolise his elevation of Black subjects to a kind of royal or heroic status within art historically dominated by white subjects.

Basquiat's rapid rise through New York's art world was extraordinary: he participated in a major group exhibition, the 1981 'New York/New Wave' show, at just twenty years old, and by 1982 was having sold-out solo exhibitions and being represented by prominent galleries, becoming one of the youngest artists ever to achieve this level of commercial and critical success in the contemporary art market, remarkable for an artist with no formal art school training.

He developed a close friendship and creative partnership with pop artist Andy Warhol beginning in 1983, the two collaborating on numerous joint paintings and forming a highly publicised relationship that brought Basquiat further mainstream visibility, though some critics at the time controversially suggested, in ways widely regarded since as reflecting racial bias, that Basquiat's success was primarily attributable to Warhol's patronage rather than his own talent — a characterisation Basquiat found deeply frustrating throughout his career.

Basquiat struggled with heroin addiction for much of the 1980s, a struggle that intensified following Warhol's death in 1987. He died of a heroin overdose on 12 August 1988 at his New York studio, at age 27. In the decades since his death, Basquiat's critical and commercial reputation has grown enormously; his 1982 painting 'Untitled' sold at auction in 2017 for $110.5 million, at the time the highest price ever paid for the work of an American artist, and he is now widely regarded as one of the most significant painters of the late 20th century.