Jean-Michel Basquiat the Notebooks 1993

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Jean-Michel Basquiat The Notebooks 1993 (catalogue):
A detailed visual summary of the evolution of Basquiat's notebooks, with a focus on … Read more Jean-Michel Basquiat The Notebooks 1993 (catalogue):
A detailed visual summary of the evolution of Basquiat's notebooks, with a focus on the inaugural edition from the early 1990s. This edition includes an introduction by Henry Geldzahler and essays contributed by Jeffrey Deitch and other notable figures.

Medium: Softcover book, 167 pages.
Very good vintage condition.
Dimensions: 12.25 x 9.25 inches.
Unsigned from an edition of unknown.
First edition first printing, 1993.

About Basquiat's Notebooks:
Jean-Michel Basquiat filled numerous notebooks with poetry fragments, wordplay, sketches, and personal observations ranging from street life and popular culture to themes of race, class, and world history. Basquiat's notebooks were defined by his the artists iconic imagery—tepees, crowns, skeleton-like figures, and grimacing faces—that also appear throughout his large-scale works, as well as an early drawing related to his series of works titled Famous Negro Athletes.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an influential African-American artist who rose to success during the 1980s. Basquiat’s paintings are largely responsible for elevating graffiti artists into the realm of the New York gallery scene. His spray-painted crowns and scribbled words referenced everything from his Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage, to political issues, pop-culture icons, and Biblical verse. The gestural marks and expressive nature of his work not only aligned him with the street art of Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, but also the Neo-Expressionists Julian Schnabel and David Salle. “If you wanna talk about influence, man, then you've got to realize that influence is not influence,” he said of his process. “It's simply someone's idea going through my new mind.” Born on December 22, 1960 in Brooklyn, NY, Basquiat never finished high school but developed an appreciation for art as a youth, from his many visits to the Brooklyn Museum of Art with his mother. His early work consisted of spray painting buildings and trains in downtown New York alongside his friend Al Diaz. The artist’s tag was the now infamous pseudonym SAMO. At only 27, his troubles with fame and drug addiction led to his tragic death from a heroin overdose on August 12, 1988 in New York, NY. The Whitney Museum of American Art held the artist’s first retrospective from October 1992 to February 1993. In 2017, after having set Basquiat’s auction record the previous year with a $57.3 million purchase, the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa surpassed it, buying the artist’s Untitled (1982) at Sotheby's for $110.5 million. This set a new record for the highest price ever paid at auction for an American artist's work. Today, Basquiat's works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among others.

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Vintage Basquiat. Basquiat Notebooks. Basquiat ephemera. See less