Last generation American painter and against whom there is no consensus among critics regarding the value of his pictorial work, for having been one of the most intense representatives of the pictorial movement known as the neo-expressionism, considering it, according to the opinion of the critics, lacking theoretical bases in its expression, without any political, social or philosophical sense either.
This movement that followed appropriationism, It was said that it was the result of a booming economic moment that had raised the price of works of art, but above all of painting, thanks to the support of gallery owners and collectors, who were looking for “works of art” as part of a trend. , turning the movement into consumer products, with no creative value whatsoever.
Jean-Michel Basquiat He was born in Brooklyn, New York on December 22, 1960, in a home of Latino immigrants, the first of three children of Gerard basquiat, an accountant of Haitian origin with great economic possibilities and Matilde Andrades, a Puerto Rican graphic designer of great professional prestige and who would mark a powerful cultural influence on her son. It was followed by two sisters, Lisane and Jeanine, also born in New York in 1964 and 1967 respectively.
The divorce of his parents forced him to change schools several times, going through private Catholic and public schools, until he finished at the age of 16 studying at the City-As-School, a school for gifted adolescents, from which he is expelled a year before graduating for rebellion.
Then give up any intention to end the high school and he leaves his home to live on the street, with friends or in abandoned buildings, but in vagrancy, as part of the urban subculture that includes street gangs, drugs and vagrancy. He survives by selling postcards and t-shirts drawn by himself.
Already in 1977 in the company of his friend Al Díaz, he started in the world of graffiti, dedicating himself to painting in the SoHo neighborhood, where art galleries and subway cars abound. His graffiti had a powerful satirical charge and he assumes the acronym SAMO with his friend, referring to “the same old shit” or “the same old shit” with which they sign their drawings.
Around that time the newspaper The Village Voice He wrote an article on the phenomenon of SAMO’s street writing, which marks the beginning of interest in his work on tags and graffiti, due to its somewhat cryptic nature.
This phenomenon of painting walls actually came from the late sixties, as a means used by young people to show their disenchantment with a society whose social, political and economic structures had betrayed them, turning the system into adverse mechanisms to them. But in addition, this type of artistic manifestation was also a way of gaining visibility in an exclusive society that kept them apart.
In 1979 he signed on the walls of SoHo, SAMO is dead and dedicates time to music in that environment of hip hop, rap, break, rock with some performances Y inderground films, until finally in 1980, even though he was a tramp, he devoted himself fully to painting.
During this time, he achieved an exceptional graphic in the gestural, product of his admiration for the abstract expressionism, like the one they represented Franz kline, De Kooning, Cy Twombly with his calligraphy and the works of Jackson Pollock, together with the Haitian and Puerto Rican influence of his ancestry. Because of his intellectual curiosity, he is also interested in combine paintings from Robert Rauschenberg and the Art brut from Jean dubuffet, achieving an outstanding expressive and plastic quality, very close to the new North American painting.
In 1986 he made a trip to Africa for an exhibition of his work in Abidjan in Ivory Coast and in November of the same year the Kestner-Gesellsschaft Museum Hannover opens an exhibition with 80 of his works. This is followed by exhibitions in 1988 in Paris and New York, after which he retires to his home in Hawaii to undergo treatment to give up his addiction to drugs and returns in June to New York declaring that he was a man released from the drugs. drugs; however, he died of a heroin overdose on August 12, 1988 when he was just 27 years old, being at the time the most successful African-American artist in visual arts.