In 1982, a twenty-one-year-old artist with no formal training walked into the Annina Nosei Gallery in New York and painted canvases in the basement that would sell for tens of thousands of dollars apiece. Within a year, he was exhibiting alongside Julian Schnabel and David Salle as one of the stars of Neo-Expressionism. Within two years, he was on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. Within six years, he was dead of a heroin overdose at age twenty-seven. In the three decades since, Jean-Michel Basquiat's paintings have sold for over $100 million at auction, and his raw, electrifying fusion of text, image, anatomy, and cultural commentary has become one of the most influential bodies of work in contemporary art.
Basquiat's art looks like it was made in a fever — and often it was. His canvases swarm with scrawled words, crossed-out phrases, skeletal figures, crowned heads, anatomical diagrams, and references ranging from Charlie Parker to Leonardo da Vinci to sugar plantations. The surfaces are dense, chaotic, layered, and urgent. They demand attention not through polish but through the sheer intensity of their energy. Every painting feels like a mind working at full speed, pouring out ideas faster than any single canvas can contain.
This article explores Basquiat's meteoric rise, his artistic methods, his major themes, and the legacy that has made him one of the most important American artists of the late 20th century.
From SAMO to Soho: Basquiat's Origins
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born on December 22, 1960, in Brooklyn, New York, to a Haitian-American father, Gerard Basquiat, and a Puerto Rican-American mother, Matilde Andrades. He was trilingual (English, French, Spanish) and precociously intelligent. His mother, who suffered from mental illness and was frequently institutionalized, took young Jean-Michel to museums regularly. By age eleven, he was a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum, and his early exposure to art history left a permanent mark on his work.
At age seven, Basquiat was hit by a car while playing in the street. During his recovery, his mother gave him a copy of Gray's Anatomy, the medical textbook. Its detailed illustrations of the human body became a lifelong visual reference — skeletons, organs, and anatomical diagrams appear throughout his paintings, often alongside words and symbols that transform them from scientific illustrations into symbols of vulnerability, mortality, and racial violence.
Jean-Michel Basquiat photographed during his brief but extraordinarily productive career. Image: Fair use, via Wikimedia Commons
Basquiat dropped out of high school at seventeen and left home. He survived by selling hand-painted postcards and T-shirts, sleeping on friends' couches and in cardboard boxes in Tompkins Square Park. With his friend Al Diaz, he began spray-painting cryptic, poetic phrases across Lower Manhattan under the tag SAMO© (short for "Same Old Shit"). Messages like "SAMO© AS AN END TO MINDWASH RELIGION, NOWHERE POLITICS, AND BOGUS PHILOSOPHY" appeared on walls throughout SoHo and the East Village, catching the attention of the downtown art scene.
The SAMO project ended in 1980 with the message "SAMO© IS DEAD," and Basquiat pivoted from street art to painting. His transition from walls to canvas was astonishingly fast. By 1981, he was included in group exhibitions. By 1982, he was a gallery sensation. By 1983, at twenty-two, he was the youngest artist ever included in the Whitney Biennial.
Basquiat's Artistic Method
Basquiat worked with ferocious speed and on multiple canvases simultaneously. His studio — often a rented loft with expensive suits hanging next to paint-spattered canvases — was a chaos of art materials, records, books, and television screens. He painted while listening to jazz, watching cartoons, and reading encyclopedias, absorbing and recombining information at a remarkable pace.
Materials and Surface
Basquiat worked on canvas, wood, doors, window frames, football helmets, and whatever else was at hand. He used oil stick (a kind of solid oil paint in crayon form), acrylic paint, spray paint, and collage. His surfaces are layered and worked — paint applied, scraped back, written over, painted again. The resulting textures feel archaeological, as if each painting contains multiple paintings fighting for visibility.
Text and Image
Words are as important as images in Basquiat's paintings. He scrawled, stenciled, and collaged words across his canvases — sometimes legible, sometimes crossed out, sometimes repeated obsessively. The crossed-out words are a signature gesture. "I cross out words so you will see them more," he explained. "The fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them." This technique gives his texts a quality of erasure and presence simultaneously — words that refuse to be silenced even as they are struck through.
Sources and References
Basquiat drew from an extraordinarily wide range of sources:
Anatomy and medicine — Gray's Anatomy, Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical drawings, medical diagrams
African and Caribbean culture — Haitian Vodou symbols, African masks, Afro-Caribbean history
Jazz and music — Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, hip-hop
Art history — Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Jean Dubuffet
Boxing and sports — Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Robinson, Joe Louis
History of slavery and colonialism — Sugar plantations, slave ships, Black historical figures
This density of reference gives Basquiat's paintings their characteristic intellectual complexity. They are not naive or spontaneous in the way they first appear — they are deeply researched, culturally layered, and deliberately constructed to look raw.
Major Themes
Race, Power, and Black Identity
Race is the engine of Basquiat's art. As a young Black man catapulted into the overwhelmingly white art world, he was acutely aware of the dynamics of power, tokenism, and exploitation. His paintings frequently depict Black figures — athletes, musicians, historical figures, and anonymous individuals — with crowns on their heads. The three-pointed crown became his most recognizable symbol, signifying royalty, divinity, and the assertion of Black dignity in a culture that systematically denied it.
Paintings like "Irony of Negro Policeman" (1981) and "Untitled (History of Black People)" (1983) address racism directly, but Basquiat's treatment of race was rarely didactic. He layered references, juxtaposed images, and let contradictions stand, creating works that provoke thought rather than deliver messages.
Mortality and the Body
Skulls, skeletons, exposed organs, and anatomical diagrams fill Basquiat's canvases. The body is always present — but it is rarely whole. It is dissected, X-rayed, broken open, and laid bare. This anatomical obsession connects to race (the Black body under surveillance, under threat, under the medical gaze) and to mortality (Basquiat seemed to know his time was short). His famous painting "Riding with Death" (1988), completed shortly before his death, shows a skeletal rider on a skeletal horse — a stark, stripped-down image of mortality that is among the most powerful works of the 1980s.
Heroes and Anti-Heroes
Basquiat's canvases are populated by heroes — but they are overwhelmingly Black heroes who had been excluded from mainstream art historical narratives. Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Jack Johnson, and Toussaint Louverture all appear, crowned and celebrated. By placing these figures in the context of large-scale gallery painting — a format traditionally reserved for European kings, saints, and mythological figures — Basquiat was making a pointed statement about whose stories deserve monumental treatment.
Basquiat and Warhol
Basquiat's friendship and collaboration with Andy Warhol is one of the most fascinating relationships in art history. They met in 1982 and began a close personal and professional partnership. Between 1984 and 1985, they produced approximately 160 collaborative paintings, with Warhol typically contributing silk-screened images and logos while Basquiat painted over and around them.
The collaboration was productive but also fraught. Critics accused Basquiat of being Warhol's mascot, and Basquiat resented the implication that he needed Warhol's validation. When the collaborative paintings received harsh reviews, the relationship cooled. Warhol died in February 1987, and Basquiat was devastated. His own death followed seventeen months later, on August 12, 1988.
Legacy and Market
Basquiat's posthumous reputation has only grown. His painting "Untitled" (1982) — a large skull-like head against a blue background — sold for $110.5 million at Sotheby's in 2017, making it the most expensive American artwork ever sold at auction at that time. The buyer was Japanese collector Yusaku Maezawa.
More importantly, Basquiat's influence on contemporary art and culture is everywhere. His fusion of high and low culture, his integration of text and image, his raw visual energy, and his unflinching engagement with race and identity have influenced artists from Kehinde Wiley to KAWS to countless street artists working today. He demonstrated that art can communicate complex ideas about race, power, and mortality without being academic or inaccessible.
Exhibition view of Basquiat's work at the "King Pleasure" exhibition organized by the Basquiat family estate, showcasing his distinctive visual vocabulary of crowns, words, and figures. Image: Adjaye Associates
How to Look at a Basquiat Painting
Basquiat's work can feel overwhelming at first. Here are strategies for engaging with it:
Read the words — Text is not decoration. Read everything, including crossed-out words. Look for repeated words or phrases. They are clues to the painting's themes.
Identify the figures — Look for heads, bodies, crowns, and skeletal forms. Basquiat's figures are often simplified but always recognizable.
Look for lists and diagrams — Basquiat frequently included lists, labels, and quasi-scientific diagrams. These organize the painting's ideas and connect to his research interests.
Notice what is crossed out — Erasure is assertion. The struck-through words and painted-over images tell you what Basquiat wanted you to struggle to see.
Consider the title — When Basquiat titled his paintings (many are "Untitled"), the titles often provide essential context or ironic commentary.
Final Thoughts
Jean-Michel Basquiat packed more artistic achievement into eight years than most artists manage in a lifetime. From the SAMO tags on Lower Manhattan walls to canvases that now hang in the world's greatest museums, his trajectory was a comet's arc — brilliant, fast, and ultimately tragically short. But the work endures because it speaks to things that have not changed: racial inequality, the commodification of Black culture, the tension between creative authenticity and market demands, and the universal human confrontation with mortality.
Basquiat refused to be categorized. He was not just a street artist, not just a Neo-Expressionist, not just a Black artist, not just a celebrity. He was all of these things and none of them, and the tensions between those identities are what give his paintings their extraordinary energy and depth.
Want to explore more about art that challenges conventions? Read about Pop Art's radical approach, or discover what makes art good. Basquiat's work is a reminder that the most powerful art often comes from those who refuse to play by the rules.
