Although Basquiat’s mother Matilde was the driving force behind the artist at a young age, it was his life experiences which shaped his personality and in turn his artwork. The first shift in focus for Basquiat occurred in 1968 when he was struck by an automobile and injured. While recovering, his mother gifts him a copy of Gray’s Anatomy and here is where he takes special interest in anatomy which is later reflected in his pieces. At age 15, Basquiat runs away from home after his parents had been divorced and his mother was in and out of mental institutions. Basquiat led a life on the streets of New York, sleeping on park benches in Tompkins Square Park and eating what he could find. Around this time, in 1976, he and Al Diaz create a fictional character by the name of SAMO (Same Old Shit) and the two began to spread witty philosophical messages throughout the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The SAMO days begin to build a name for Basquiat and, along with his ingenious and suave personality, he slowly integrates in the art scene of New York. Basquiat’s capacity to distill his perception of the outside world down to their essence, and project them outward through his art is what defined his unique style. He was capable of digesting complex social issues such as racial injustice or religion and unlock a more basic truth through his simple, thought provoking pieces. One of Basquiat’s most iconic pieces, Irony of the Negro Policeman deals with criticism of his own race. Because
Every religion in this world has their own culture and thereby their own creative forms, like art, dance, architecture, music and craft. Like the tradition varies from each religion to religion so as their Art. I chose to compare Art forms of Islamic Art and Hinduism Art, as Art have always exited me and inspired me in many ideas, and secondly arts have its own history and reasoning.
There exist three basic components of traditional Islamic art: calligraphy, geometric patterns, and floral and vegetal motifs. These three stylistic tools are beautifully rendered and masterfully integrated into complex works of art, but there is no question that artistic expression is severely limited under these categorizations. However, this limitation stems from Islamic theology and concept of art. The main reason for the limitation imposed on visual art is the Islamic theological prohibition of figural imagery. Social laws presented in the Hadith prevented the representation of figures because any imitation was deemed idolatrous. Also, art is considered to be decorative and imitative. Script and patterns are used to decorate
“Basquiat, The Radiant Child” is a documentary about a young artist of the early 2000’s. This young artist left home to begin his journey; he started out as a bum with nothing and became a street artist. Obviously, Basquiat was very driven by his work otherwise he wouldn’t have taken such a big risk. For this reason, many people were inspired by him and loved what he was doing. I however wasn’t a big fan of his. Throughout the documentary his friends and other artist talk about how he would pretty much mooch off of other people; although his friends said it in a nicer way. He even told his girlfriend that he couldn’t work because he didn’t like how people treated him, so she had to pay for their rent on her own. I personally felt like this
So within the context of the movie Basquait the story emerges of a Haitian-American kid, who has 'seen the streets' and lived on the hard side of the tracks. Carrying his copy of 'Greys Anatomy' he dissects the streets, dissects and illustrates what he finds beneath and this dissects society and his own fractured place in it. His art even looks a bit like the anatomical drawings of Greys Anatomy and it is this ferocious dissection that formed the basis of a lot of his work. Although Mayer said “Basquiat speaks articulately while dodging the full impact of clarity like a matador. We can read his pictures without strenuous effort—the words, the images, the colors and the construction—but we cannot quite fathom the point they belabor” it is maybe through the lens of thinking about his background as a child who had a challenging childhood that we can figure out what was going on (2205 50). His painting of an African-American policeman with its huge size and broken body may give a further clue with the cultural / race identity confusion of his childhood in the 1960's and 1970's very evident. It is these pressures combined with the pressures of the corporate money-focused art-as-currency/investment discourse that must surely impact on an artist such as Basquiat: painting from within the establishment and making money from it a mechanism that can only
During the 1800s many fundamental changes took place in the British colonies in West Africa. Later after the period of the slave trade, "slavery had been abolished throughout the British empire" (6). Although around this time all slaves were believed to be free, it was hard for slaves to set free of themselves. However, African American men found it easy to “run away, go to court, or escape” (108) during this time; the results of men being rebellious led to slave owners only wanted women because they believe that women would make better slaves because they were less likely to run away, this resulted in slavery begin a “female condition in the region” (108). In other words, women struggled more trying to receive their freedom, their jobs were almost hardly possible. In this case, women like Abina Mansah faced many challenges that are being represented in the graphic novel Abina and the Important Men: A Graphic History.
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born on December 22, 1960, in Brooklyn, New York. His mother was a Puerto Rican, and his father was a Haitian immigrant, the combination of both eventually led Jean-Michel's into learning creole, Spanish, and English. At an early age, Jean-Michel decided he wanted to be a cartoonist and so his mother took him to a art museums in order to stimulate his imagination. He showed a precocious talent for drawing, and his mother enrolled him as a Junior Member of the Brooklyn Museum when he was six. At the age of eight, he was extremely injured in a car accident and was hospitalized for a month. He broke his arm, suffered multiple internal injuries and underwent a splenectomy. His mother brought him a copy of his Grey’s
In the 1980’s the art world was gifted with the artist Jean michel basquiat. Basquiat, a man who lived two contrasting lives as street artist and “fine artist” in the art punk movement of the 1980’s. His work as a street artist was full of poetic and provocative messages painted in the streets of Manhattan New York, and his work as a “fine artist” did the same on gigantic canvases with looming figures in bold colours. Regardless of this dichotomy, his work in both of these practices has the ability to bring light to issues he and many others were facing and are still facing now. In particular, Basquiat’s work brought light to his personal experience with racism and struggle with otherness in and outside of the brutal art world. The next paragraphs will discuss how Jean Michel Basquiat delt and fought the oppressive systems of his time through his art.
His mother, who was something of an amateur artist herself, frequently took him to visit New York’s many art museums, and even enrolled him in a children’s program at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Basquiat would later credit his mother with getting him started as an artist. Basquiat’s first artistic works were cartoon drawings, often of characters from Alfred Hitchcock films. Basquiat would sit beside his mother at night, drawing his cartoon sketches while she worked on her own designs.” From what I have researched I have learned that Basquiat and his father did not have a good relationship.
Jean-Michel Basquiat emerged from the punk scene in New York as a street-smart graffiti artist. He successfully crossed over his downtown origins to the international art gallery circuit. Basquiat’s work is one of the few examples of how an early 1980’s American graffiti-based could become a fully recognized artist. Despite his work’s unstudied appearance, Basquiat very skillfully and purposefully brought together in his art a host of disparate traditions, practices and styles to create a unique kind of visual collage. His work is an example of how American artists of the 1980’s could reintroduce the human figure in their work after the wide success of minimalism and conceptualism.
In Grandview Boulevard, completed in 1974 CE, the artist utilizes painterly brushstrokes. The shadows of the trees that are painted dark purple appear to have more painterly aspects than the rest of the composition. From far away, the painting seems smooth and sleek, but up close, the individual thick brushstrokes can be seen. The implied texture of the leaves in the painting is sturdy and prickly, and the texture of the yellowed grass appears to be dry and coarse, however, the actual texture of the painting itself is smooth. The artist also uses both curvilinear and geometric lines. In looking at the trees in the painting, they are composed of primarily geometric lines (excluding the leafy top) that run in a
‘Black Aesthetic’ works were not based on good or bad writing, but rather on its ability to stir its reader’s emotions and motivate them.
Jean Michael Basquiat was an African American Painter part of the Neo- Expressionism movement and was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1960. Coming from the “punk” and “graffiti” scene in New York, Basquiat has now become one of the most celebrated African American Painters in the Neo- Expressionism movement. Basquiat’s work is considered “unstudied” because he didn’t go to school for art. Even though the appearance of his work seems to be unstudied he skillfully created collages using a lot of urban influences and African-Caribbean tradition. One of my favorite Basquiat paintings is untitled and was painted (1982). In this untitled painting Basquiat uses images that are often associated with African art, a skull, a bone, and an arrow but Basquiat modernizes the images in his Neo- Expressionist style using thickly applied paint and rapidly rendered subjects.
Basquiat emerged in the period between Black Power and the contemporary scene, when entering the art world was still almost impossible for African American artists despite the passage of the Civil Rights Acts. Basquiat wanted to articulate the new position in which desegregated African Americans found themselves as inner cities crumbled and white flight accelerated. Even as laws prohibited intentional racism, racialization of American life continued. Basquiat attempted to bridge the post-soul aesthetic of hip hop's graffiti artists with the irony of contemporary American and African American art. Basquiat's deployment of irony, however, differed significantly from other African American artists. Not only did he question the unconscious racialization
I like to believe that art was a way for Blacks to express their pain, hopefulness, and love that everything Black wanted and could just outright say was put into art; therefore, art was a happy place even though it expressed pain but in pain there is its own beauty. DuBois (1925:53) stated that even though Black art has both personal and universal aspects, that those two things are “combined with certain groups compulsion.” meaning that there was a Black person that spoke for the group through art. His thoughts would lead to black Aesthetic.
“Painting today is pure intuition and luck and taking advantage of what happens when you splash the stuff down. “- Francis Bacon. However when I learnt more about history of art and the way each movement and happenings in the world inspired artist to make new works, I was able to see much more than just a canvas with random paints and sketches. The interesting part about this concept is that each piece of art could be interpreted in many different ways. In contemporary art there isn’t right and wrong, each of us view and find different meanings and connections with artworks.