1960, Brooklyn births yet another artist. Jean-Michel Basquiat is born. His neon-toned palette, a distinguished silhouette, he’s managed to tie in each of his works, the terrible truth, denunciation, and dreaming, making use of the illusion of joy.
As a child, his sole pursuit was drawing. In 1976, before ending his high school career, Basquiat met Al Diaz who, like himself, was escaping from the drudgery of school work through graffiti. That same year, he embarked on a quest for concrete canvases in Manhattan. The walls were soon teeming with strange symbols, not without a certain poetry to them. Basquiat’s signature is simple: “SAMO”, which stands for “same old s***”. His era gave him a whole world to soak up. As if the graffitis were superposed, vying for space, squeezing one another out, his work is like a patchwork. When the teenager decided to live alone, he definitively banished himself from his familial abode. To ensure his survival, he sold post cards and t-shirts on the sidewalk of his native city. At night, he frequented the Mudd Clud and Club 57 where he met Madonna, Bowie, and even Andy Warhol who bought one of his post card and shook up his entire universe of artistic sense. His canvases became a rhetoric of his visual observations: his soul vibrated and materialized in the street amongst all its elements: poverty, cars, children, a bit of everything was sampled and mixed into these extinct cultures that haunted him.
Influenced by Daily, Picasso, Warhol, and Goya, Basquiat worked a disorder that was not falsely a superposition of writings, collages, and paintings, charging the entire finished product with an indispensable light-heartedness in the face of what he’s targeting: the denunciation of racism and hyper-consumerism. Success quickly came to him, but as revered and respected as he was, the artist was still a loner. Misunderstood by his companions and family, his soul finally found peace after a valiant battle with heroine addiction. Andy Warhol’s death in 1987 was the last straw for Jean-Michel, who left this world not long after.
In 1989, one year after the death of the painter, U2 bassist Adam Clayton urged the band to acquire Untitled (Pecho/oreja), an indescribable primitive work of imagination. Collectively acquired, the canvas accompanies them to their recording sessions in their Dublin studio. In 2008, they parted ways with it for around 5 million pounds sterling. Now on February 12, the piece will be back on the market. The auction house Sotheby’s, a specialist in art, will be in charge of the proceedings. With an estimated worth of between 7 and 9 million pounds, the painting has since become a myth. Just as much as their creator, who like every star, was unable to content himself with belonging to one single galaxy.
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