Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiatwas an American artist. He first achieved notoriety as part of SAMO, an informal graffiti duo who wrote enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side of Manhattan during the late 1970s where the hip hop, post-punk, and street art movements had coalesced. By the 1980s, he was exhibiting his neo-expressionist paintings in galleries and museums internationally. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his art in 1992...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth22 December 1960
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
I don't think about art when I'm working. I try to think about life.
I thought I was going to be a bum the rest of my life.
Occasionally, when I get mad at a woman, I'll do some great, awful painting about her.
I wanted to be a cartoonist when I was young.
I don't think about art when I'm working. I think about life.
I wanted to be a star, not a gallery mascot.
I start a picture and I finish it.
I like kids' work more than work by real artists any day.
I wanted to build up a name for myself.
Believe it or not, I can actually draw.
If I'm away from painting for a week, I get bored.
The black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings. I realized that I didn't see many paintings with black people in them.
SAMO as an end to to mindwash religion, nowhere politics and bogus philosophy.
Since I was seventeen I thought I might be a star. I'd think about all my heroes, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix... I had a romantic feeling about how these people became famous.