Jean-Michel Basquiat - 80s New York Friday, December 17, 2010 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Artist Biography

    Jean-Michel Basquiat

    American • 1960 - 1988

    One of the most famous American artists of all time, Jean-Michel Basquiat first gained notoriety as a subversive graffiti-artist and street poet in the late 1970s. Operating under the pseudonym SAMO, he emblazoned the abandoned walls of the city with his unique blend of enigmatic symbols, icons and aphorisms. A voracious autodidact, by 1980, at 22-years of age, Basquiat began to direct his extraordinary talent towards painting and drawing. His powerful works brilliantly captured the zeitgeist of the 1980s New York underground scene and catapulted Basquiat on a dizzying meteoric ascent to international stardom that would only be put to a halt by his untimely death in 1988.

    Basquiat's iconoclastic oeuvre revolves around the human figure. Exploiting the creative potential of free association and past experience, he created deeply personal, often autobiographical, images by drawing liberally from such disparate fields as urban street culture, music, poetry, Christian iconography, African-American and Aztec cultural histories and a broad range of art historical sources.

    View More Works

48

Untitled (Head)

1983-2001
Screenprint in colors, on Museum Board.
40 x 40 in. (101.6 x 101.6 cm).
Numbered  78/85 in pencil, with the estate stamp, and signed and dated by the executor Gerard Basquiat on the reverse, published by DeSanctis Carr Fine Art, Los Angeles, framed.

Estimate
$10,000 - 15,000 

Sold for $25,000

80s

17 December 2010
New York