Jean-Michel Basquiat

The Gagosian survey is the volume that reads Basquiat's paintings through the Afro-Atlantic visual traditions they draw on, and sets that scholarship beside a first-hand memoir by the critic who put him in front of an art audience.

Published by Gagosian with Rizzoli in 2015 at 10 1/4 x 12 inches, the book gathers some sixty colour plates with foldouts, candid photographs of the artist at work, and full-page installation views. Robert Farris Thompson, the Yale historian of Kongo and Yoruba art, situates the major paintings within both twentieth-century art history and the Atlantic diaspora sources Basquiat drew on. Rene Ricard, whose 1981 Artforum essay "The Radiant Child" first placed Basquiat before an art readership, contributes a close account of their friendship from 1981 until the artist's death in 1988.

Basquiat (1960-1988) moved from the SAMO(c) tags he wrote with Al Diaz on downtown Manhattan walls to the canvases, drawings and Warhol collaborations of a career that lasted barely eight years. His work is held by the Whitney, MoMA, the Broad and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, and has been the subject of retrospectives at the Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum, the Fondation Beyeler and the Barbican.