Born in 1960 in Brooklyn, New York Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American Painter belonging
to ‘Neo-Expressionism’ who emerged as a street-smart graffiti, carefree-but-intense artist in New York.
The magnitude of his work gave him immense fame in quick time and he led him to international art galleries. What is now every evident about him is that he, in a few years, rose to become one of the most celebrated and most commercially viable American painter of the widely celebrated Neo-Expressionism art movement.
Basquiat’s took graffiti to an entire new dimensions and during early 1980s amidst American Punk culture he could actually create an independent identity for himself and a distinction as well. He had come from the downtown and now he was all around the place with critiques as well as art lovers and big galleries offering him his due space. In a short span of time he become a fully recognized, critically embraced and popularly celebrated artistic phenomenon, indeed not unlike the rise of American Hip Hop during the same era.
Basquiat had the distinction of skillfully and purposefully bringing together in his art a volley of various traditions, practices, and
styles in order to create a unique kind of visual collage, one deriving, in part, from his urban origins, and in another a more distant, African-Caribbean heritage.
His tragic death by drug overdose put an early end to this enigmatic artist who lived in the commercial, economically superficial international art scene of the mid 1980s when there was too much of fake applaud besides some serious appreciation and critique of art works.
Basquiat’s experiments with human figures in his works are often referred to as ‘establishing a dialogue with the more distant tradition of 1950s Abstract Expressionism’. Basquiat died on August 12, 1988 in New York, New York, USA due to drug overdose.
