Jean-Michel Basquiat
by Hans Werner Holzwarth and Eleanor Nairne
(Taschen, £20)

FROM crude but salient sentences scrawled on walls to multimillion-dollar canvases that the artist never actually saw any proceeds from, Jean-Michel Basquiat's work embodies the contradictions of the modern art world.

This is not about the milieu of the Old Masters, the baroque, romantics or realists but rather the story of a young man who in his short life produced a series of major works that mixed culture and history with commentary, spontaneity, splendour, splashes of colour and the rough-and-ready all at once.

Part of renowned art publisher Taschen’s 40th anniversary celebrations, this book tracks Basquiat and his art from the early graffiti-driven commentary in the late 1970s through to working with Warhol in the mid-1980s and on to his untimely death from a heroin overdose in 1988, aged just 27.

Dividing his art into eight periods, Hans Werner Holzwarth and Eleanor Nairne bring together hundreds of his works that hold their relevance to this day.

Starting with the spray-painted SAMO tag, the teenage Basquiat and his friend Al Diaz scrawled messages across 1970s New York that stood out not for their self-aggrandisement but for their pseudo-philosophical sarcasm and arch observation of a declining and decadent metropolis.  

And from words, came pictures; abstract, obtuse, crude, yet cute and notably of a particular style.

To see a Basquiat is to see the world through the eyes of a young black man. It was like nothing before, barring perhaps the abstract expressionist Cy Twombly, a definitive influence.

There are messages, scrawled letters, hieroglyphs, numbers and words and, in many, a stark and most notably black character, front and centre, both figuratively and metaphorically.

Basquiat’s early works like untitled (Blue Aeroplane) are abstract, childlike, colourful and hint at what is to come. As the book progresses, it shows how the art evolves but also how Basquiat’s roots remain in his art.

There’s a strong current of black history and culture, with figures from music and sport such as Miles Davis or Cassius Clay (Muhammed Ali) prominent. This harks back to Basquiat’s early interest in bebop jazz and his celebration of his own culture and environment, whether that be New York or wider afield.

Throughout, there are works with a dark undercurrent, whether that be the black skull that sold for over $110 million in 2017, the Obliteration of Exu or the final piece in the book, 1988’s prescient Riding with Death.

The work starts to fade towards the end, perhaps due to Basquiat's heroin haze or because he had burned so brightly and so quickly. And then it stops, a talent cut down most definitely when there was much more to come.

The text adds value and context but it is the art that counts. There’s something about Basquiat’s work — primitive yet modern, complex but childlike — that always has something to show and say.

Definitely a book to delve into and delight in.