Basquiat soon acquired full awareness of his condition as artist. In his paintings appear elements that until then had remained on the fringes of art, but were closely linked with popular culture, like the pop world, comic book heroes, advertising images, prepared food packaging, icons of the consumer culture of those years.

Jean-Michel Basquiat is doubtlessly one of the most extraordinary phenomena in painting of the final years of the last century.

From the very outset the artist Basquiat - born in New York, but clearly of Afro-American descent - made his blackness grounds for diversity and for rebellion, not only in his renewal of expressive language, but also in turning into spectacle the stimuli offered by the modern city, using its spaces to shout out the anguish and existential confusion of an entire generation.

At first, the walls of buildings and subway stations became the open stage for this story, told rapidly, and almost covertly, through words and images inscribed using cans of spray paint.

The Perennial Shadow of Art in Basquiat’s Brief Life

Achille Bonito Oliva

Art: From Subways to SoHo, Jean-Michel Basquiat

Henry Geldzahler

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Speaking in Tongues

Richard D. Marshall

Word Hunger: Basquiat and Leonardo

Jeffrey Hoffeld

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente and Andy Warhol: Collaborations

Bruno Bischofberger

Jean-Michel Basquiat. The Word and the Image

Luciano Caprile

Catalogue

by Luca Marenzi

Biography

by Gala Regazzoni

One-Man Exhibitions

Main Group Exhibitions

Selected Bibliography