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Jean-Michel Basquiat[bAs´´kE-At´] Pronunciation Key, 1960–88, American painter, b. Brooklyn, N.Y. Born into a middle-class Haitian and Puerto Rican family, he was a 1980s art star whose rise and fall were rapid and dramatic. A rebel, high school dropout, and part of the downtown New York scene, he was influenced by the violence of street life and by the life and work of Andy Warhol, who became his mentor. Basquiat started as a graffiti artist, making images and writing slogans on the walls of buildings, and also produced painted T-shirts, found-object assemblages, and paintings. In the early 1980s he was "discovered" by the art establishment, and his works in paint and crayon on unprimed canvas, featuring crude, angry, and rawly powerful figures and graffitilike written messages, were much sought after by collectors. He died of a heroin overdose at the age of 27.
See biography by P. Hoban (1998).
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