Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988)

USA

      
        

In his short life (1960-1988), Jean-Michel Basquiat came to personify the art scene of the 80s, with its merging of youth culture, money, hype, success, and self-destruction. And then there was the work, which the public image tended to overshadow: paintings and drawings that conjured up marginal urban black culture and black history, as well as the artist's own conflicted sense of identity.

He was, all at once it seemed, the ultimate party animal, a wannabe street-kid and grafittist hiding his black Brooklyn middle class roots, an advocate and interpreter of the marginal and dispossessed at the court of the mainstream, an angry black aspirant to the all-white art, a precocious talent, a creature of cynical marketing and, an American original.