Jean-Michel Basquiat

Comprehensive retrospective in celebration of the artist’s fiftieth birthday. Exhibition schedule: Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland (May 9–September 5, 2010).

This retrospective publication traces the artist’s unique career and pinpoints his important position in art history. Basquiat’s works are marked by the kind of intensity and energy that also determined the course of his brief life.

In just eight years—comparable to the career of Egon Schiele—Basquiat not only managed to create an extensive oeuvre, but also to establish new figurative and expressive elements alongside Conceptual and Minimal Art. At the age of twenty-one, he became the youngest artist ever to be invited to the documenta, while his work also anticipated that of Germany’s Junge Wilde movement and the art of the nineties.

The catalogue presents articles by Dieter Buchhart, Glenn O’Brien et Robert Storr, an interview of Jean-Michel Basquiat by Becky Johnston and Tamra Davis (1985), who only existed as a video until now.