Jean-Michel Basquiat

This is the catalogue that made Basquiat a museum artist: the record of the first full retrospective of his work, organised by Richard Marshall for the Whitney Museum of American Art four years after the artist's death.

Published in 1992 by the Whitney with Harry N. Abrams, the 272-page volume documents the exhibition that travelled from New York to the Menil Collection in Houston, the Des Moines Art Center and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. Marshall's catalogue assembles the paintings, drawings and painted objects alongside a detailed chronology, exhibition history and bibliography, and it established the framework - the SAMO(c) years, the downtown scene, the Warhol collaborations, the recurring vocabulary of crowns, anatomy and erased words - that later scholarship has argued with and built on.

Basquiat (1960-1988) produced roughly a thousand paintings and two thousand drawings in eight years. Marshall, then a curator at the Whitney, had earlier organised its "New Image Painting" and "Fifty Years of Collecting" surveys; his Basquiat catalogue remains the point of departure for the Brooklyn Museum, Fondation Beyeler and Barbican projects that followed.