Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1960-1988

Taschen's Basic Art volume is the primer version of Basquiat: ninety-six pages that carry the whole arc of the work in a format designed to put it in as many hands as possible.

Published in 2003 and written by the German art historian Leonhard Emmerling, the book follows the chronology from the SAMO(c) graffiti Basquiat wrote with Al Diaz on SoHo walls, through the breakout group show "New York/New Wave" at P.S.1 in 1981, to the Warhol collaborations and the late paintings. Colour plates of the major canvases are set against a biographical chronology and short readings of individual works. Basic Art is the format Taschen has used since 1985 for single-artist introductions, and this remains the most widely circulated Basquiat title in print.

Basquiat (1960-1988) was the first Black American painter to reach that scale of international attention in his own lifetime, showing at Documenta 7 at twenty-one and in the 1983 Whitney Biennial. Emmerling has written similar volumes on Jackson Pollock for the same series.