On This Day In Gay History & A Birthday

This morning marks the signing of the repeal of the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy, the 17-year-old policy banning on homosexuals serving openly in the United States military, was signed into law by President Barack Obama. I never dreamed...

A gay, 20th Century artist is right up my alley. Gay history, art history, NYC in the 1970s, all my interests intersect with Jean-Michel Basquiat. Born on this day in middle class Brooklyn. His father, an accountant, was Haitian & his mother was Puerto Rican. As a teenager, he left home to live in lower Manhattan, selling hand painted tee shirts & postcards on the street. His work began to attract attention in the early 1980s after a group of underground artists held a public exhibition-The Times Square Show.

Basquiat's unique visual vocabulary of graffiti symbols & urban rage challenged accepted notions of art. His vivid paintings incorporated such diverse images as African masks, quotes from Leonardo di Vinci & Grey's Anatomy, Egyptian murals, pop culture, & jazz. Critics called his work childlike & menacing & neo-primitive.

 Basquiat associated with other artists whose work drew from popular culture: Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, & Keith Haring. Haring: "Basquiat’s stuff I saw on the walls was more poetry than graffiti. They were sort of philosophical poems . . . . On the surface they seemed really simple, but the minute I saw them I knew that they were more than that. From the beginning he was my favorite artist."


Embraced by the art world, Basquiat soared to international fame. In 1982 his work was exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Rome, Rotterdam & Zurich. He was the youngest artist ever to be included in the prestigious German exhibition, Documenta 7. In 1985, he appeared on the cover of The NY Times Magazine. After Warhol died on February 22, 1987, Basquiat became increasingly isolated, and his heroin addiction and depression became more severe. After an attempt at sobriety during a trip to Maui, Hawaii, Basquiat died of a heroin overdose in his art studio on Great Jones Street in New York City's NoHo neighborhood on August 12, 1988, at the age of 27.

Several major museum retrospective exhibitions of Basquiat's works have been held since his death. The first was the "Jean-Michel Basquiat" exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 1993. It subsequently traveled to museums in Texas, Iowa, & Alabama. Another major & influential exhibition was the "Basquiat" exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 2005.

Until 2002, the highest price paid for an original work of Basquiat's was 3 million + at Christie's. in 2003, Basquiat's large piece- Profit I, owned by drummer Lars Ulrich of the heavy metal band Metallica, was set for auction again at Christie's. It sold $6 million.
In  2008, at another auction at Christie's, Ulrich sold a 1982 Basquiat piece, Untitled (Boxer), for $13,522,500 to an anonymous telephone bidder. The record price for a Basquiat painting was madein 2007, when an untitled Basquiat work from 1981 sold at Sotheby's in New York for $14.6 million.If you are interested in him. & you should be, try the 1996 film- Basquiat, directed by Julian Schnabel, with actor Jeffrey Wright playing Basquiat & David Bowie as Andy Warhol. Or try the2009 documentary Jean Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child.