The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader: Writings, Interviews, and Critical Responses

by Jordana Moore Saggese (Editor)

Overview

The first comprehensive collection of the words and works of a movement-defining artist.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) burst onto the art scene in the summer of 1980 as one of approximately one hundred artists exhibiting at the 1980 Times Square Show in New York City. By 1982, at the age of twenty-one, Basquiat had solo exhibitions in galleries in Italy, New York, and Los Angeles. Basquiat's artistic career followed the rapid trajectory of Wall Street, which boomed from 1983 to 1987. In the span of just a few years, this Black boy from Brooklyn had become one of the most famous American artists of the 1980s. The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader is the first comprehensive sourcebook on the artist, closing gaps that have until now limited the sustained study and definitive archiving of his work and its impact.
 
Eight years after his first exhibition, Basquiat was dead, but his popularity has only grown. Through a combination of interviews with the artist, criticism from the artist's lifetime and immediately after, previously unpublished research by the author, and a selection of the most important critical essays on the artist's work, this collection provides a full picture of the artist's views on art and culture, his working process, and the critical significance of his work both then and now.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520305168
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	03/02/2021
Series:	Documents of Twentieth-Century Art
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	408
Sales rank:	1,104,951
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Jordana Moore Saggese is Associate Professor of modern and contemporary American art at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT IN HIS OWN WORDS
Interview by Marc H. Miller, 1982
Interview by Henry Geldzahler, 1982
Interview by Lisa Licitra Ponti, 1983
Interview by Geoff Dunlop and Sandy Nairne, 1985
Interview by Becky Johnston and Tamra Davis, 1985
Interview by Démosthènes Davvetas, 1985–1988
Interview by Isabelle Graw, 1986

BASQUIAT'S LANGUAGE
Texts by Jean-Michel Basquiat

CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM AND COMMENTARY
The Radiant Child
Rene Ricard, 1981

Schnabel and Basquiat: Explosions and Chaos
Hunter Drohojowska, 1982

Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jeffrey Deitch, 1982

Jean-Michel Basquiat at Annina Nosei
Lisa Liebmann, 1982

Jean-Michel Basquiat at Fun Gallery
Susan Hapgood, 1983

Black Picasso and the Lie Detector
Diego Cortez, 1983

New Kid on the (Auction) Block
Ellen Lubell, 1984

Jean-Michel Basquiat
Kate Linker, 1984

Jean-Michel Basquiat at Boone/Werner
Nicolas A. Moufarrege, 1984

New Art, New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist
Cathleen McGuigan, 1985

Activating Heaven: The Incantatory Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat
Robert Farris Thompson, 1985

Art: Basquiat, Warhol
Vivien Raynor, 1985

Andy Warhol/Jean-Michel Basquiat
Robert Mahoney, 1985

Andy Warhol/Jean-Michel Basquiat
Ronald Jones, 1986

Jean-Michel Basquiat
Barry Schwabsky, 1986

KNOWING BASQUIAT
Interviews by Jordana Moore Saggese

Michael Holman, 2007
Suzanne Mallouk, 2008
Bruno Bischofberger, 2010
Robert Farris Thompson, 2011
Dieter Buchhart, 2019
Erika Belle, 2019
Diego Cortez, 2019

THE AFTERLIFE OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
Jean Basquiat, 27, an Artist of Words and Angular Images
Constance L. Hays, 1988

Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1960–1988
Hilton Als, 1988

Martyr without a Cause
Peter Schjeldahl, 1988

Remembering Basquiat
Keith Haring, 1988

Requiem for a Featherweight: The Sad Story of an Artist's Success
Robert Hughes, 1988

New York: More Post-Modern Than Primitive
Gregory Galligan, 1988

Saint Jean-Michel
Frederick Ted Castle, 1989

Nobody Loves a Genius Child: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lonesome Flyboy in the '80s Art Boom Buttermilk
Greg Tate, 1989

Welcome to the Terrordome: Jean-Michel Basquiat and the "Dark" Side of Hybridity
Dick Hebdige, 1992

Royal Slumming: Jean-Michel Basquiat Here Below
Thomas McEvilley, 1992

Altars of Sacrifice: Re-membering Basquiat
bell hooks, 1993

A Day at the Races: Lorraine O’Grady on Basquiat and the Black Art World
Lorraine O’Grady, 1993

Tip-Tapping on a Tightrope
Franklin Sirmans, 1994

Famous and Dandy like B. 'n' Andy: Race, Pop, and Basquiat
José Esteban Muñoz, 1996

Lost in Translation: Jean-Michel in the (Re)Mix
Kellie Jones, 2005

Basquiat's Poetics
Christopher Stackhouse, 2015

Chronology
List of Illustration Credits
Index

Editorial Reviews

01/04/2021

Art professor Saggese (Reading Basquiat) provides a thorough overview of the life and work of African American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in this impressive volume. Saggese’s Basquiat is a “subversive” social commentator and visionary, whose Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage provided source material for his art as he “probed the boundaries of blackness.” The book describes Basquiat’s cultural values and working process, drawing on critical essays; a substantial collection of interviews with the artist, which includes a plethora of quotes (“I wanted to make very direct paintings that most people would feel the emotion behind”); examples taken from his notebooks; and pieces written by the artist’s friends and contemporaries, including an elegiac 1988 essay by Keith Haring entitled “Remembering Basquiat” and a moving remembrance Hilton Als wrote for the Village Voice shortly after Basquiat’s death, in which he noted, “Jean lived his life like he had nothing to lose.” This comprehensive survey should be required reading for contemporary art and African American history connoisseurs alike. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"If Basquiat’s ultimate fate in the annals of art history remains unknown, it is Saggese’s Reader to which the future will turn for guidance as she expertly maps out the historical territory."

Rain Taxi Review of Books