Jean Michel Basquiat Analysis

Jean-Michel Basquiat was more than an amazing artist, he was a poet, a musician and is his late teens somewhat of a graffiti artist. His art now reflects the gritty and colorful streets of Lower Manhattan in the 1980’s whilst concurrently remaining contemporary and timeless. Basquiats’ Neo-Expressionist art is in the league of Picasso, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and other innovative art legends. His character seduced and enamored those around him. He even befriended Madonna. An average painting is his lifetime went for $5000- $10,000 at the least and just recently his painting “Untitled” (a skull) painted in 1982 sold for $110.5 million at Sotheby’s auction in May 2017; this is the 6th most expensive work ever sold at an auction. Only 10 other works have broken the $100 million mark. Being a black artist in his time, he often faced discrimination, unable to hail a cab on the …show more content…
He is a somewhat of a mulatto because his father is Haitian and his mother is of Puerto Rican descent. His love for art began at a young age; his mother would take him to different art museums in New York and enrolled him as a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. He was a gifted child who could read and write at the tender age of four and by age eleven was fluent in French Spanish and English. On September 1968 at the age of seven Basquiat was hit by a car his injuries resulted in a broken arm and a splenectomy (a surgical removal of the spleen). According to Basquiat this accident is his first prominent memory . His mother gave him Gray’s Anatomy, a textbook about human anatomy, to entertain him while he was recovering. This book later influenced his artistic outlook. For example, many of his paintings are of skulls and although not usually proportional, different parts of the human body. To name a few: Boxer (painted 1982), Scull (painted 1981), Rice and Chicken (painted 1981) and hundreds