Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Neo-Expressionism
Reading time: 2 mins
Emerging from the New York Post-Punk Underground scene, Jean-Michel Basquiat tied together art historical references, the African American condition, and raw emotion in the controlled chaos of his paintings.
In the 1980s, SoHo, New York was filled with young creatives looking to make it, inspired by Warhol’s success. Basquiat’s peers included Madonna, whom he briefly dated, and Debbie Harry, who was the first person to buy one of his paintings, for only $200 – right before the financial boom that saw a surge in art sales. Seen as a new and exciting way to invest, Basquiat's works began to sell for upwards of $20,000.
Before the name Basquiat was recognised by every art lover and critic in NY and beyond, the name SAMO© was creating a buzz in the New York post-punk underground scene.
Tagged on walls across SoHo, the name, which is an anagram for SAMe old Shit, would appear accompanied by street poetry that offered commentary on art-world elitism, politics, and consumerist society. Basquiat created SAMO© with school friend and fellow artist Al Diaz, the two would take turns to come up with a new line to tag, and on their busiest days, they would tag 30 walls, making it impossible not to see and be intrigued by the rebellious and thought-provoking phrases, and wondering who was behind them.
As a child, Basquait would frequent galleries like MOMA with his mother, who also gifted to him a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, which lasted as a source of inspiration into adulthood, informing the figurative elements of his paintings – even his No Wave band that made avant-garde noise was called Gray.
Neo-Expressionism
The Neo-Expressionist movement emerged in the 1970s predominantly across Germany, Italy and the United States. It was born out of a rejection of minimalism and conceptual art, and the over-intellectualisation of art that created a distance between the work and the viewer.
A revival of painting that encompassed heavy textural application and fast, intuitive mark making with a focus on figuration, Neo-Expressionism was a raw, emotional, messy portrayal of the human condition.
Basquiat’s work: Cultural and Political, Personal and Universal
No other artist is more synonymous with Neo-Expressionism than Jean-Michel Basquiat. In his work, graffiti, poetry, personal identity, culture, politics, African heritage, jazz, Haitian Vodou, colonial history and consumerism collide, with an intense energy.
Portraits of people he admires feature in many popular works. The crown, instantly recognisable as Basquiat’s, adorns his black idols, including jazz musicians and boxing champions, giving them royal status. While others reference icons of art history, as well as his contemporaries.
Leonardo da Vinci’s Greatest Hits
Basquiat included an eclectic mix of art historical figures in his paintings. Leonardo da Vinci’s Greatest Hits reflects the artist’s study of Gray’s Anatomy as well as Leonardo’s anatomical drawings. Basquiat scattered drawings of bodies and body parts throughout the painting, with many humorous and nonsensical graphic notations.
In this painting Basquiat includes his own interpretation of some of Da Vinci's most notorious paintings such as 'Vitruvian Man', in which Basquiat depicted his own muscular male figure with outstretched arms adorned with a halo-like sphere.
In the lower-left corner he depicted the African American folk hero John Henry to acknowledge the effects of manual labour. According to legend, Henry, a steel driver, competed against a steam-powered drill, a recent invention. Henry bested his mechanised opponent, only to die from exhaustion at his moment of victory. He became a symbol of both the labour and civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s.
Sketch of Keith Haring
Keith Haring moved to New York in 1978 to study painting at the School of Visual Arts, becoming immersed in the art scene of the East Village and an admirer and friend of Basquiat. In a Rolling Stones interview in 1989, a year after Basquiat’s untimely death, Haring speaks of Basquiat and his early graffiti when he was still using the name SAMO:
‘Before I knew who he was, I became obsessed with Basquiat’s work […] The stuff I saw on the walls was more poetry than graffiti […] from the beginning he was my favourite artist’.
In 1983, Basquiat completed the portrait ‘Sketch of Keith Haring’. For this work, Basquiat adopted a feature of traditional Renaissance portraiture where personal objects were included to help provide information about the sitter. Basquiat depicted Haring wearing a T-shirt adorned with one of the most recognisable images from his artwork, the radiant baby, and incorporated the word 'famous' in a halo-like sphere above Haring's head establishing his status.
Sources
- Keith Haring: Just Say Know - An interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, 1989
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