Jean Michel Basquiat Essay

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work is a good examples, a one of few, how an early 1980s American Punk or graffiti-based counter-cultural practice could become a fully recognized, critically embraced and popularly celebrated artistic phenomenon. Also, it is an example of how American artists of the 1980s could reintroduce the human figure in their work after the wide success of Conceptualism and Minimalism, thus establishing a dialogue with the more distant tradition of the 1950s Abstract Expressionism

Despite ‘’unstudied’’ appearance of his work, Basquiat very purposefully and skillfully brought together in his art a host of disparate traditions, styles and practices in order to create a unique kind of visual collage, one deriving, partly, from his urban origins, and in another a more distant, African-Caribbean heritage.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was born on December, 22 in 1960, in Brooklyn, New York. He was raised in a

In 1972, with Diaz, his artist friend, he started spray-paintings in Lower Manhattan under the name SAMO ( an acronym for Same Old Shit), painted anonymous messages and statements . The anti-religion, anti-politics, as well as anti-establishment credo packaged in an ultra-contemporary form, SAMO soon received media attention from the counter-culture press. Citing artistic differences, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Diaz chose to severe their collaboration, , with the three-word announcement- SAMO is dead. Carried out episodically at various cities as a piece of ephemeral graffiti art, the phrase surfaced repeatedly on walls and buildings throughout Lower Manhattan. At one time, a sigh of trespassing and vandalism, graffiti in the hands of Diaz and Basquiat became a tool of artistic ’branding’ repeated here and there throughout the billboard- dotted city, ‘’SAMO is dead’’ slowly took on the status of a corporate mantra, such as for instance ‘’Seeing is