Jean-Michel Basquiat's major body of work was made in roughly eight years. He started as a teenager, tagging downtown Manhattan walls with the cryptic signature SAMO in 1977. By twenty-one he was the youngest artist ever invited to Documenta, the international exhibition held every five years in Kassel, Germany. He died in 1988, at twenty-seven.
The Basquiat retrospective from Hatje Cantz was published for the Fondation Beyeler exhibition marking what would have been his fiftieth year. It carries 334 color plates across that short, dense career, with texts that place the work in art history rather than only in the story of the artist's life.
Where should you start with Basquiat?
Start with the paintings, not the myth. Basquiat's reputation has absorbed so much biography: downtown New York in the late seventies, the crash of the eighties art market, the friendship with Andy Warhol, and the work itself can get lost underneath all of it. This book's job is to put the work back in front. Dieter Buchhart, Glenn O'Brien, Jean-Louis Prat, and Susanne Reichling each write from a different angle: curatorial, art-historical, personal. None of them are trying to make him a symbol.
What was SAMO?
SAMO stood for "same old shit," and it was the tag Basquiat used with collaborator Al Diaz on walls around SoHo and the East Village starting in 1977, before either of them signed their own names to anything. The phrases were aphoristic, half joke and half indictment, meant to be read as writing before anyone thought of them as art. Basquiat dropped the alias in 1980 and started showing under his own name almost immediately.
Why did Documenta matter?
Documenta 7, held in Kassel in 1982, is one of the most closely watched exhibitions in contemporary art: a once-every-five-years survey of where the field stands. Basquiat was invited at twenty-one, the youngest artist in a show of more than 170. It's the moment this book uses to mark how fast the work moved from the street to the center of the international art conversation, in well under five years.
What do the essays add that a biography wouldn't?
Buchhart and Prat both worked directly on Basquiat exhibitions and write with the specificity of people who have spent time with the actual objects: materials, scale, the difference between a canvas and a door. O'Brien, who edited Interview and knew Basquiat personally, writes closer to the ground. Reichling works the exhibition history. Together they resist the temptation to explain the paintings through the life, which is the trap most Basquiat writing falls into.
The book
- Hardcover, 224 pages
- 10 × 12.25 in
- 334 color plates
- Hatje Cantz, 2010
- ISBN 9783775725934
Basquiat's compressed career is worth reading against two very different archives: Keith Haring's insistence that art belonged on the street and not just in galleries, in our piece on Haring's subway drawings, and a filmmaker who built one continuous archive over thirty years instead of eight, in our post on Wes Anderson's archive.
The Basquiat retrospective is available now, part of our KNOWLEDGE collection.
Frequently asked questions
What is SAMO?
SAMO was the tag Jean-Michel Basquiat used with Al Diaz on walls in SoHo and the East Village starting in 1977, before Basquiat began exhibiting under his own name.
How old was Basquiat when he showed at Documenta?
He was twenty-one when he was invited to Documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982, the youngest artist in the exhibition.
When was this Basquiat book published, and why?
Hatje Cantz published it in 2010 alongside a retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler marking what would have been Basquiat's fiftieth year.
How many images are in the book?
It contains 334 color plates across 224 pages.
Who wrote the essays?
Dieter Buchhart, Glenn O'Brien, Jean-Louis Prat, and Susanne Reichling.
sabi is an online boutique based in Portland, Oregon. Our KNOWLEDGE collection is the reference shelf, books on the things we sell and the ideas underneath them.