Jean-Michel Basquiat

An American artist of Puerto Rican/Haitian descent, Jean-Michel Basquiat is famous for his neo-expressionistic paintings and graffiti creations. His art can be seen as a random collage of ideas, which are shown either visually or verbally on the canvas. Rather than attempting to create an appealing piece of art, Basquiat's art conveyed subliminal information to the viewer as well as an expression of raw emotion. A collection of works by Jean-Michel Basquiat is being auctioned by Bidsquare. Explore and purchase Jean-Michel Basquiat's artworks available for purchase. Discover the artist's paintings, prints, and sculptures.

Basquiat is widely acclaimed for his graffiti-like paintings and scrawled texts in a gestural style. In his art, Basquiat explored the interplay of his Latinx, African, and American ancestry with a personally meaningful language of symbols, signs, and figures, moving from street to gallery with an expanding scope, ambition, and scale. A lot of Basquiat's work turned on themes such as racial prejudice, classism, and colonialism, and how they affected the American society at large. In addition to his three-pointed crown motif, his abstractions and figurations are often infused with words and poetry. From his Caribbean roots to pop-culture icons, political issues, and biblical verses, his spray-painted crowns and scrawled words served as a commentary on his life. The dichotomies of affluence and poverty, inclusion and segregation, as well as internal and external experiences were all central themes in Basquiat's art.

Most of Basquiat's works are layered with meaning, with a few being explained by the artist, and others left open for viewers to interpret. His work describes a world that is at once exciting, inspiring, oppressive, and toxic because of strange confluences of images and words, a flood of information and stimuli. A key aspect of Basquiat's work is how, following minimalism and conceptualism's dominance in the art market, 1980s American artists began reintroducing and prioritizing the human figure in their work. Neo-Expressionist painters such as Basquiat were seen as building upon the realism and abstract expressionism of the 1950s as well as the earlier expressionist movement. His rapid success in the 1980s led him to make friends with many celebrities and artists, among them Andy Warhol. Together, these two artists created over a hundred artworks, resulting from their close friendship and an intense artistic partnership. As a result of this precipitous rise, he became recognized as one of the leading artists of the neo-expressionism movement in the American art world.

At auction, Basquiat's Untitled (1982) made history when it sold for $110.5 million, becoming the most expensive work of art ever sold by an American artist. He was widely acclaimed before and after his premature death at 27 for the profundity and immediacy of his paintings. The paintings and drawings of Basquiat appear to evolve with each passing year, a testament to the constant changes, simultaneity, and multiplicity of human existence.  Several museum collections now house Basquiat's paintings, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art. 

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