Basquiat: Drawings
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
Basquiat: Drawings Details
Jean Michel Basquiat died in 1988 at the age of 27 after a decade spent in frantic pursuit of life and art. During his brief, but productive reign as "enfant terrible" and prodigious deity, Basquiat impacted contemporary art with an unsettling mixture of artistic resources and a personal mastery of the social nuances of his era. Collaborator with other artists such as Andy Warhol and Francesco Clemente and an influence on their work, Basquiat remains today a controversial artist of significance and excitement. The drawings in this book, published to coincide with The Whitney Museum of American Art's major retrospective of Basquiat's painting, capture all the energy, excess and conflict of the 1980s. An essential link between his street art and his painting, Basquiat's drawings provide insight into his artistic imagination and explore the entire range of his diverse interests. Read more
Reviews
Overall good book, heavy on visuals. The images are from a NYC-based show in 1990, a few years after Basquiat's passing. The original price for this first edition was $35 in 1990. In 2017, $70 was the least expensive soft-cover to be found. It includes 137 pages of color drawings from 81-88. Of the many hundreds of drawings produced in JMB's short brilliant life, it is not a comprehensive collection of his strongest works as I hoped/expected; rather, it seems more of a sampling of works on paper that were collected together for the show. Maybe the over-priced (>$1000) 3-volume hardcover catalogue raisonne' is the place to find a broader coverage of works on paper ?...Another slight issue with the book is that there is no indication of date produced (unless the artist dated it, on occasion) nor the size of each work. Unclear if the book is chronological or...?, but that's a minor observation.* While the book was accurately listed as 'Good'-Used, I encountered for the first time a book that smelled like it was stored in a stale, smoky environment -an aspect that will never published about the quality of the book. *