Jean Micheal Basquiat Research Paper

The Life and Work of Jean Micheal Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn New York in 1960. His mother was of Puerto Rican heritage and his father was a Haitian immigrant. Basquiat’s mother used to take him to New York City Museums and he developed a deep love for art. His parents separated and he was forced to live with his father because his mother was mental unstable. At 18 he left home and dropped out of high school due to the intense emotional abuse he felt. His work became rooted in the graffiti movement, in the early 70’s he started spray painting buildings under the name SAMO with fellow artist Al Diaz. They had a falling out and he ended up homeless and surviving off selling painted postcards and bouncing from place
He would write an observant statement about the society he was living within and tag it with SAMO which stood for “Same Old Shit”. Basquiat grafitted all over the place and began generating a lot of talk in the art world, everyone wanted to find out who SAMO was. In a recent interview Al Diaz explained what they were doing concisely, “At the time we didn’t know what we were doing, but it was a response to everything around us from the culture, to the times….to everything we were disillusioned by (Jean-Micheal Basquiat Part 1). Graffiti was once frowned upon and viewed a vandalism but here Basquiat used his urban landscape as a branding tool to become a recognizable figure to the public. Though homeless and broke he created thought promoting work simply through words and a can of paint. In Figure 1, Basquiat wrote ‘SAMO AS AN END’. In this angsty yet powerful statement. Here Basquiat is rebelling against the traditional white-walled stuffy art scene, by using graffiti on the outside of a public building he is bringing the arts to the street. Essentially calling an end to the same old shit we’ve been looking at for years. He created SAMO shortly after he left home and decided he never wanted to return to his family and believed he could be a bum forever. (The Radiant Child). Basquiat had a falling out with Al Diaz and ended SAMO by painting ‘SAMO IS DEAD’ over many SoHo art
A big part of Basquiat’s work is xerography, before he became famous he used to make small postcard photocopies of his work and sell them on the street. Later on he would make copies of his work and paste them onto to other canvases of new work. I wasn’t until he became good friends with Warhol that he took this exploration further. Warhol would silk screen then Basquiat would come in and layer over his works. “Basquiat masterfully remixed his own iconography with that of his mentor, a communication if appropriation” (Saggese, 95). Arm and Hammer II was painted by Warhol and Basquiat in 1985, it is acrylic and silkscreen on canvas. In this piece Warhol has silk screened a very common household cleaning logo twice and Basquiat has come in and defaced the left one censoring the logo with black brushstrokes over the font. Basquiat is attempting to humanize something that is mass produced and unoriginal. He has painted a black saxophone player in the center of the logo and the death date of Charlie Parker, 1955, underneath with the word ‘LIBERTY’ above to create a coin. “Basquiat had likewise focused our attention on the commercialization and subsequent exploitation of talent—a subject that consistently occupied the young artist” (Sagagese, 95). At this point in Basquiat’s career he becoming even more famous, he started doing drugs, and became increasingly paranoid with the press and