Indie Idols: Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat. Photo: Corbis
In this series, we’d like to give you a little primer on those icons – movies, musicians, artists, girls-about-town, that are often cited by fashion designers, and editors, as inspiration behind collections, and editorials.
Who: Jean-Michel Basquiat
What: Painter
Jean-Michel Basquiat at work in a scene from the movie ‘Downtown 81.′
Tell Me More: Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in New York City in 1960, to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, who encouraged his artistic leanings from a young age. By the time he was 16, he was already gaining notoriety for his graffiti, which he did alongside his high school friend Al Diaz under the name SAMO. SAMO, which stood for “same old shit,” was a sort of “concept graffiti,” characterized by short phrases, similar to marketing copywriting, which sold the imaginary product of “SAMO” as a cure to the ails of modern society and the contemporary art world. Phrases like,
“SAMO©… 4 THE SO-CALLED AVANT-GARDE”
and
“WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING IS OMNIPRESENT?
[ ] LEE HARVEY OSWALD
[ ] COCA-COLA LOGO
[ ] GENERAL MELONRY
[ ] SAMO©…”
were both poetic and tongue-in-cheek, and took the concept of graffiti to the next level, both by being self aware of its ubiquity and in a way, interacting with the people who might see it. When Basquiat and Diaz’ friendship fell apart, “SAMO© IS DEAD” tags appeared all over the city.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Untitled (Estrella)”, 1985, Oil paintstick
Then, Basquiat started painting. His work combined pop art and neo-expressionist influences, and often incorporated words, in a manner similar to his work with SAMO. In 1980, he participated in the “Times Square Show,” an art exhibit that featured some of the most prominent artists of the downtown Manhattan scene and soon thereafter his career truly took off. He started showing at important galleries, he befriended Andy Warhol after seeing him at a restaurant and dropping off some of his illustrations at his table. The two would later collaborate on an exhibit together. Unlike other artists who find fame after their deaths, Basquiat was lauded in his lifetime, and was even featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. He briefly dated Madonna, and collaborated with David Bowie. He was a young, hugely talented, good looking artist with the world at his feet, which as so many other stories go, inevitably comes with an addiction to drugs or alcohol. In Basquiat’s case it was heroin. Although he tried to kick the habit many times before, he eventually succumbed to the drug, and died of an overdose at his studio in 1988. He was 27.
Two untitled paintings from 1982. Photo: Corbis
Signature Style: His oversized canvases are filled with color and figures, and his paintings often dealt with topics of race, class, and wealth. There is a doodle-like quality to his work, whose innocence belies the larger subjects at hand. He was as much a poet as he was a painter, and a mixed-media artist, and whether his work is on canvas, a wall, or the hundreds of notebooks that he filled with his musings – sometimes as a test for a larger work, sometimes as pieces meant to stand on their own – which are currently on exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
His iconic personal style – he was often known to paint in Armani or Versace suits like they were any old rags, spoke to his desire to screw with the status-quo. A previously unpublished image of Basquiat in a beat-up leather jacket casually thrown over the shoulders of a herringbone tweed suit, was used as the cover of T magazine’s latest Men’s Style issue. Anyone not familiar with the artist would probably not be able to guess it was taken 20 years ago. His look was as distinctive as his art, and he even walked in a Comme des Garçons fashion show in 1987.
His work mixed “old world” art qualities with a certain hyper-awareness of modern life, of the things constantly being sold to us, of the way things – ads, TV shows, actors, books – influence our way of thinking. And in that sense, his work will forever remain timeless.
Jean-Michel Basquiat on the cover of the Men’s Style Issue of ‘T’ magazine, March 2015.
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