Who was the real Jean-Michel Basquiat?

On a cold Sunday in February 1985, Jean-Michel Basquiat graced the cover of The New York Times Magazine. Barefoot in his studio, he wore an elegant black suit with regal aplomb, kicking back comfortably above the headline: ​‘New Art, New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist.’ Just 24 years old, the native Brooklynite’s singular blend of raw talent, ambition, and mystique took the art world by storm with paintings selling for up to $25,000 ($80,000 today), prompting proper consideration of the neo-expressionist painter, who had until then been largely misunderstood, marginalised, or labelled as ​“primitivist.” 

During his brief but radiant life, Basquiat was, in the words of legendary writer Greg Tate, the ​“Flyboy in the Buttermilk” – a visionary who confronted, confounded, and subverted the system that flourished on the twin systems of extraction and exclusion of Black arts and culture. At the time of Basquiat’s death in 1988 at the age of 27, the art world had written him off, only for the artist to reemerge in death as one of the great masters of 20^th century art. By 2017, Basquiat joined a rarefied group of artists including Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, and Leonardo da Vinci whose paintings could fetch over $100 million at auction – while also being splashed across all kinds of mass market merchandise. 

While most life stories end in death, art world insider Doug Woodham uses this as the departure point for Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Making of an Icon (Thames & Hudson), the first biography of the artist in 25 years. Drawing from over 100 interviews with family, friends, gallerists, collectors, and contemporaries, Woodham masterfully charts Basquiat’s life, death, and apotheosis, which began in earnest with his father Gerard’s strategic positioning of the estate beginning in 1989. 

• Read next: Inside the late teenage years of Basquiat

Theirs was a strained relationship in life as well as death, with the subjects of Basquiat’s sexuality and drug use a divide that his father never crossed. As such, the book does not feature reproductions from the Basquiat Estate, but instead contains photographs by Bob Gruen, Edo Bertoglio, Flint Gennari, and Marcia Resnick that illuminate more intimate aspects of Jean-Michel’s life and character. 

“Basquiat wanted to be famous,” Woodham says. SAMO®, his late 1970s collab with Al Diaz, gave him a taste of the future to come, and the power to build his name from the streets up. Harnessing the DIY spirit of downtown New York, Basquiat understood how to play the game without letting it compromise his art, a profoundly untenable position. While the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ​’70s picked up where the Harlem Renaissance left off, it would be decades before photographers like Anthony Barboza, Earlie Hudnall Jr., James Barnor, and Ming Smith would receive recognition from the art world. 

Perhaps Basquiat understood he didn’t have that kind of time and planted the seeds that shaped his posthumous fate. ​“When a Basquiat painting sold for $110.5 million at Sotheby’s in May 2017, it became a global news story that fixated on the staggering price,” Woodham says. ​“After a journey that spanned decades, Basquiat became a worldwide name in a single night.”

• Read next: Meet Lady Pink, the ​‘First Lady’ of graffiti

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Making of an Icon by Doug Woodham is published by Thames & Hudson.

Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.

Buy your copy of Huck 82 here.

Enjoyed this article? Follow Huck on Instagram and sign up to our newsletter for more from the cutting edge of sport, music and counterculture.