Jean Michel Basquiat Biography

Jean-Michel Basquiat was a very huge success and it was well deserved. Jean-Michel Basquiat was a very hard worker who never stopped due to outside pressure and he seemed to know where he stood in the art world as well. In the Sirmans paper, Basquiat is represented as a well rounded artist who went forward with his career without fear and he embraced his race and showed it shamelessly through his artwork. Sirmans discusses Basquiat’s early career and how he was a pioneer just by combining different elements such as music, performance and visual art together. Basquiat was also faced with many doubts from critics of course. This could be attested to different opinions, was he criticized due to his surprisingly quickly rising fame or did it have …show more content…
A quote from Peter Schjeldahl made a comment about Basquiat that has some prejudice behind it. He said “I would not have expected from a black artist Basquiat’s vastly self-assured grasp of New York big-painting aesthetics…”, Schejeldahl also went on to say that he expected a white artist behind the work. Basquiat’s work was political and made his viewers uncomfortable and confronted them with issues that they might not have wanted to think about. His piece Gringo Pilot was definitely a piece that made the viewer think, the piece being about the Hiroshima bombing is a direct punch to the United States and their violence towards Japan. In bell hooks paper she writes about how Basquiat was influenced and inspired by white male artists, but his work never really showcased that. Yet if that were true, would he not stylize his pieces much differently? I think being in a white centric art world it is hard not to have some pull from white artists, but to say that Basquiat was influenced is pushing it too far. Hughes mentions how Andy Warhol was a mentor to Basquiat, but even though he was a white artist his artwork was not necessarily Eurocentric. In Hughes paper, Basquiat was called out for behaving like someone who is white that wants to be black, which brings the …show more content…
He was criticized for acting white, for making his artwork just like white artists and even for piggy backing on white artists to raise to fame. The fame that he received was not only because his artwork was political and represented his black heroes and even brought up the subject of white colonialism. Basquiat fought the white art standard and because of that he gained attention and rose to be well known. He made people discuss his artwork and raised so many questions about his race and where he stood in the traditional fine arts