terça-feira, 19 de junho de 2007







Origem: Wikipédia, a enciclopédia livre.
Jean-Michel Basquiat (Nova Iorque, 22 de dezembro de 196012 de agosto de 1988) foi um pintor estadunidense. Sua mãe era filha de porto-riquenhos e seu pai era haitiano.
Basquiat começou fazendo graffiti aos 16 anos, em metrôs e muros de Manhattan, e acabou se tornando um grande artista internacional de vanguarda da década de 1980.
Na infância sofreu um atropelamento. Para entretê-lo durante a recuperação, sua mãe lhe deu um livro de anatomia. Isso influenciou muito sua arte, pois suas obras tinham muitos detalhes anatômicos.
Seus primeiros graffitis nas ruas eram assinados como SAMO (abreviação de "same old shit"), pseudônimo que Basquiat e seu colega Al Diaz criaram. Em 1980 parou de grafitar e começou a pintar telas. Nesta época escreveu pelas paredes de toda Nova York: Samo morreu.
Basquiat achava que as pessoas são muito ligadas ao material e pregava que devíamos estar mais voltados para o espiritual. Dizia que a classe média se preocupava muito em ficar mostrando o que não tem, com roupas caras, e que só faltava andar com a etiqueta aparecendo para se exibirem ainda mais.
Foi um amigo pessoal de Andy Warhol, com quem compartilhou técnica e inspiração.
Faleceu em 1988, vítima de overdose de heroína, em seu estúdio.






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Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960, Brooklyn - August 12, 1988, New York, New York) was an American artist. He gained fame, first as a graffiti artist in New York City, and then as a highly successful Neo-expressionist artist in the international art scene of the 1980s. Many recognize Basquiat as a leading figure in contemporary art, and his paintings continue to command high prices in the art market.
Life

SAMO SHIT: Grafitti on an East Village bathroom wall imitating Jean-Michel Basquiat, who used to write the exact phrase on the walls of the East Village.
His mother, Matilde, was Puerto Rican and his father, Gerard Jean-Baptiste, is of Haïtian origin and a former Haitian Minister of the Interior. At an early age, Basquiat displayed an aptitude for art and was encouraged by his mother to draw, paint, and to participate in other art-related activities. Around the age of seven Basquiat was hospitalized for injuries related to a car accident. When in the hospital Basquiat's mother gave him the book Gray's Anatomy as a gift to pass the time. Basquiat loved the diagrams in the book, which inspired his artwork and led to the creation of the band "Gray".
In 1977, when he was 17, Basquiat and his friend Al Diaz started spray-painting graffiti art on slum buildings in lower Manhattan, adding the infamous signature of "SAMO" or "SAMO shit" (i.e. "same ol' shit"). The graphics were pithy messages such as "Plush safe he think; SAMO” and ""SAMO is an escape clause". In December 1978, the Village Voice published an article about the writings. The SAMO project ended with the epitaph SAMO IS DEAD written on the walls of SoHo buildings.
In 1978, Basquiat dropped out of Edward R. Murrow High School and left home, a year before graduating. He moved into the city and lived with friends, surviving by selling T-shirts and postcards on the street. By 1979, however, Basquiat gained a certain celebrity status amidst the thriving art scene of Manhattan's East Village, for his regular appearances on Glenn O'Brien's live public-access cable show, TV Party.
In June 1980, he first started to gain recognition when he participated in The Times Square Show, a multi-artist exhibition, sponsored by Collaborative Projects Incorporated (Colab). In 1981, poet, art critic and cultural provocateur Rene Ricard published "The Radiant Child" in Artforum magazine, helping to launch Basquiat's career to an international stage.
During the next few years, he continued exhibiting his works around New York alongside artists such as Keith Haring, Barbara Kruger, as well as internationally, promoted by such gallery owners and patrons as Annina Nosei, Vrej Baghoomian, Larry Gagosian, Mary Boone and Bruno Bischofberger. By 1982, Basquiat was showing regularly alongside Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi, thus becoming part of a loose-knit group that art-writers, curators, and collectors would soon be calling the Neo-expressionist movement. He started dating an aspiring performer named Madonna in the fall of 1982. In 1982, Basquiat met Andy Warhol, with whom he collaborated extensively, eventually forging a close, if strained, friendship.
By 1984, many of Basquiat's friends were concerned about his excessive drug use and increasingly erratic behaviour, including signs of paranoia. Basquiat had developed a frequent heroin habit by this point, starting from his early years living among the junkies and street artists in New York's underground.
In 1985 Basquiat appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine in a feature entitled "New Art, New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist". As Basquiat's international success heightened, his works were shown in solo exhibitions across major European capitals.
Jean-Michel Basquiat died of mixed-drug toxicity (he had been combining cocaine and heroin, known as "speedballing") in his Great Jones Street loft/studio in 1988 several days before what would have been Basquiat's second trip to the Côte d'Ivoire.

Art periods
Basquiat's art career is known for his three broad, though overlapping styles. In the earliest period, from 1980 to late 1982, Basquiat used painterly gestures on canvas, often depicting skeletal figures and mask-like faces that expressed his obsession with mortality. Other frequently depicted imagery such as automobiles, buildings, police, children's sidewalk games, and graffiti came from his experience painting on the city streets. A middle period from late 1982 to 1985 featured multipanel paintings and individual canvases with exposed stretcher bars, the surface dense with writing, collage and seemingly unrelated imagery. These works reveal a strong interest in Basquiat's black and Haitian identity and his identification with historical and contemporary black figures and events. On one occasion Basquiat painted his girlfriend's dress, with his words, a "Little Shit Brown". The final period, from about 1986 to Basquiat's death in 1988, displays a new type of figurative depiction, in a new style with different symbols and content from new sources. This period seems to have also had a profound impact on the styles of artists who admired Basquiat's work. Basquiat's lasting creative influence is immediately recognizable in the work of subsequent and self-taught generational artists such as Mark Gonzales, Kelly D. Williams, and Raymond Morris.

Andy Warhol
In 1982, Basquiat befriended pop artist Andy Warhol and the two made a number of collaborative works. They also painted together, influencing each others' work. Some speculated that Andy Warhol was merely using Basquiat for some of his techniques and insight. Their relationship continued until Warhol's death in 1987. Warhol's death was very distressing for Basquiat, and is speculated by Phoebe Hoban, in Basquiat, her 1998 biography on the artist, that Warhol's death was a turning point for Basquiat, and that afterwards his drug addiction and depression began to spiral.

Movies and television
Basquiat's character has been represented in motion pictures. He has been portrayed by Jeffrey Wright in Basquiat, a bio-pic about the artist directed by Julian Schnabel. He played himself in Downtown 81 (a.k.a New York Beat Movie), and in Blondie's video for "Rapture". Jean-Michel was also a frequent guest on "Glenn O'Brien's TV Party", a NYC public access television show.

Value of Artwork
Up until 2002, the highest mark that was paid for an original work of Basquiat's was $3,302,500 (set on 12 November 1998). On 14 May 2002 Basquiat's "Profit I" (a large piece of art measuring 86.5" by 157.5"), owned by heavy metal band Metallica co-founder Lars Ulrich, was put up for auction at Christie's. It was there that the highest mark for a work of Basquiat's was set when "Profit I" sold for $5,509,500.[1] The proceedings of the auction are documented in the film Some Kind of Monster.
On 15 May 2007, an untitled Basquiat work from 1981 smashed his previous record, selling at Sotheby's in New York for $14.6 million.[1]

Quotes
"Every single line means something."
"Since I was seventeen I thought I might be a star. I'd think about all my heroes, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix... I had a romantic feeling about how these people became famous."
"I don't think about art when I'm working. I try to think about life."
"Believe it or not, I can actually draw."
"I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is."






Um pintor que rompeu o status quo na pintura e se adaptou tão bem a vida dionísica.

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