Jean-Michel Basquiat

My life in art: How Jean-Michel Basquiat taught me to forget about technique

Basquiat may have had no formal training, but his visceral work communicates with absolute clarity and urgency his own experience of life, writes Will Gompertz

Will Gompertz
12 February 2009

I've just taken delivery of an extraordinary work of art. It's a contemporary homage to John Everett Millais's famous Ophelia. I think mine is way better than Millais's original, which, although technically brilliant, is a tad formal for my taste. Which isn't that surprising. Millais was a senior member of the art establishment – a serious and important man. The artist who painted my version has never had a job, and has absolutely no truck with all that establishment glad-handing. He's far more interested in chocolate ice cream and bedtime stories.

Jean-Michel Basquiat / Boom for Real is an exhilarating glimpse behind the myth

Detail of Self-Portrait by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1984)

Basquiat: Boom for Real is an exhilarating glimpse behind the myth: Barbican, London, review

•  Mark Hudson, art critic 

18 SEPTEMBER 2017 • 4:46PM

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s short life reads like a kind of Rakes Progress of Eighties New York: from teenage graffiti artist to art world superstar to heroin-induced death aged 27, all in under a decade. But Basquiat has become much more than an icon of monetarist-era excess. Thirty years on from his tragic demise, his status as one of the key artists of our age appears to be actually rising – particularly among the young – a position reflected in extraordinary prices; the $110.5 million (£85 million) achieved earlier this year for Untitled 1982 is the highest price ever paid for an American artist at auction.

Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol outside the Mary Boone Gallery, New York, 3 May 1984.
Photograph: The Andy Warhol Foundation

Andy Warhol's friendship with Jean-Michel Basquiat revealed in 400 unseen photos

Book offers ‘voyeuristic glimpse’ into the two artists’ lives with hundreds of Warhol’s images and diary entries

Dalya Alberge

Monday 20 May 2019

A“voyeuristic” glimpse into the world of two of the late 20th century’s greatest artists is to be revealed in a book that finally brings to light some of the 130,000 photographs that Andy Warholtook to document every aspect of his life.

More than 32 years after Warhol’s death, hundreds of his photographs are set to reveal the minutiae of his friendship with fellow artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, capturing many moments together – whether partying, getting their nails painted, or even, for Basquiat, while in the depths of depression facing suicidal thoughts.