Basquiat

This 2010 monograph traces Jean-Michel Basquiat's eight-year career through more than three hundred color plates, brought together to mark what would have been the artist's fiftieth birthday.

Published by Hatje Cantz for an exhibition at Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, near Basel, that ran from May to September 2010, the book was edited by curator Dieter Buchhart with Jean-Louis Prat and Susanne Reichling, and includes an essay by longtime friend and writer Glenn O'Brien. A chronology situates the plates within Basquiat's short working life. The oversized hardcover runs 224 pages with 334 color images, and its cover reproduces the 1985 painting Now's the Time, a black tondo built around the shape of a vinyl record.

Basquiat moved from the graffiti tag SAMO to gallery walls in barely three years, forming close ties with Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Madonna along the way. His paintings pulled from jazz, boxing, anatomy, and Black history to stand apart from the Neo-Expressionism and Conceptual art around him. He died in 1988 at twenty-seven, and this catalogue, built around a major European retrospective, remains one of the fuller surveys of that compressed body of work.