80's New York Legend Great Influence in Art Schools

Almost twenty years after his death, Jean Michel Basquiat is the subject of an exhaustive retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, just down the road from the tough neighborhoods this half Haitian, half Puerto-Rican art star grew up in.

In one of those odd ironies of fate that exist so well in the art world, many of today's art school students are greatly influenced by the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, a New York artist and scenester who died of a heroine overdose in 1988 at 28.

Art School Icon
The irony lies in the fact that Basquiat received no formal training. His painting developed from his graffiti work. Clever, talented, and ambitious, the young Basquiat put his graffiti all over the hip neighborhoods of the late seventies, places like Soho, Chelsea and the East Village. These street doodles usually consisted of primitive, stick like characters often with the inscription SAMO written on them, Basquiat's sort of tagline.

A New York Legend is Born
Before long, Basquiat was a downtown legend. Andy Warhol and his acolytes clamored to meet this man and as it just so happened, the man in question was young, talented, charismatic, and, well, gorgeous. A star was born.

Despite being an eighties New York party fixture, Basquiat's art is some of the most influential of its era. His paintings take on racism and his multi-ethnic heritage in a sort of folkloric, primitive style that art students mimic regularly today. Because the man came from the streets, Basquiat's doodles have this authenticity that many art school students cherish and yearn for. Basquiat is an authenticity reference.

Art Schools Channel Contradictions
Basquiat once said that his art was eighty percent about anger. He celebrated historical heroes like the boxer Joe Louis and jazzman Charlie Parker. He depicted Southern racism and crack ravaged New York in his mural style paintings. And he produced all this while rock stars and millionaires hovered around him in his vast Soho loft space. Basquiat, like many great artists before him, was a man of contradictions.

Many artists who head towards art school in New York or any other place, often have a desire to depict similar contradictions in their own lives. That is why Jean-Michel Basquiat remains such an art school archetype, despite the fact he never went to art school.