Basquiat

Artist:  Jean-Michel Basquiat

Birth-Death:  2/22/1960 – 8/12/1988

Movement:  Neo-expressionism

Bio:  Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1960 to Gerard Basquiat, a Haitian, and Matilde Andrades, a Puerto Rican.  Basquiat learned how to read and write by the age of four, and was encouraged by his mother to express himself artistically.  By the age of eleven, he could fluently speak, read, and write English, French, and Spanish.  At the age of seven, Basquiat was hit by a car and underwent a month-long recovery in the hospital, where his mother brought him a copy of "Grey's Anatomy," which later influenced his art.  That same year, his parents separated and his father raised him.  At fifteen, Basquiat began running away from home and sleeping on park benches.  Basquiat dropped out of high school in the tenth grade, and then his father kicked him out of the house.  He spent much time living in friends' houses and supporting himself by selling T-shirts and postcards.  Soon after, his professional art career began.

     Obviously, Basquiat was not raised a sophisticated aristocrat.  In fact, even after his art became well known and he was successful, he was still not an aristocrat.  This did not mean he wasn't intelligent, educated, or extremely talented – only that he was not part of the elite art world.  Basquiat came from a broken home, and had an arguably troubled youth.  He often modeled much of his work on graffiti-style painting, and even painted graffiti as SAMO.  In many ways, his art was the opposite of "class" and "etiquette" because it culminated so many other forms of art that had been born on the street, like graffiti.  But, he also seemed to blend the "uncivilized" with the "civilized," such as his re-creations and interpretations of classic works by Da Vinci and other artists.  His work is representative of the blurred line between the two statuses that he transcends.  Interestingly, he transcends these statuses because of his capacity to blur the line, which obscures it once again.



What are the differences between the way the narrator talks about Jean-Michel Basquiat and the way he talks about himself?  How do these differences reflect the supposed status of each man?