Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Iconic Work

The artists most inspired works in one volume.

Jean-Michel Basquiatartist and art world provocateurtook New York City by storm with his powerful and complex works that relentlessly engaged with charged sociopolitical issues, including race, police brutality, and structural inequity. In this important volume, devoted to an exhibition at the Brant Foundation in their newly opened Manhattan outpost featuring the artists key works, Basquiats art returns to its East Village roots, contextualized for the first time in decades in the very neighborhood that served as one of his greatest inspirations.

Dieter Buchhart, noted Basquiat scholar and curator, brings together one hundred of the artists most important works, focusing on the best examples of the many subjects that informed Basquiats work, from jazz, anatomy, sports figures, comics, classical literature, the African diaspora, and art history. The exhibition partially restages three of the artists critical early shows, including an exhibition of the artists paintings and drawings of heads at Robert Miller Gallery; his most important canvases from Gagosian Gallerys 1982 show in Los Angeles; and Basquiats solo show at Fun Gallery in the East Village. Buchhart also considers in-depth the artists so-called stretcher bar paintings, in which the normally hidden wooden supports for stretched canvases are exposed, works that have yet to be explored at length by scholars. In so doing, Buchhart offers a critical assessment of the enduring importance and legacy of the artists work.

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