JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

Basquiat was indeed cool. He didn't try to be: he just was. He had interests ranging from hip-hop, jazz, baseball and boxing through to French poetry, the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci and highbrow modernist art. It was the appreciation of the latter, and most likely his encounter with the art of American abstract expressionist painter Cy Twombly that gave Basquiat the confidence to go from graffiti to fine art.

By the early 80s Basquiat was gaining a significant reputation for his paintings. Not only were they highly individualistic – a mixture of words, crudely drawn cartoonish figures and daubs of coloured paint – they were paintings. That was pretty radical. At the time art had disappeared down an intellectual cul-de-sac, where abstract, minimalist sculptures, devoid of any discernable humanity, were very much the order of the day. Basquiat's art wasn't so much a new chapter; it was a whole new book.

The Guardian
Feb 12 2009