The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat

The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat Official Account for Jean-Michel Basquiat, produced by The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Tickets for “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure©” available at:
https://kingpleasure.basquiat.com/tickets/

Phillips describes Jean-Michel’s Untitled as offering “a vivid view into the artist’s energetic, imaginative, and ingeni...
09/18/2026

Phillips describes Jean-Michel’s Untitled as offering “a vivid view into the artist’s energetic, imaginative, and ingenious mind.”

Phillips continues, “The present drawing represents a confident assertion of Basquiat’s draftsmanship and instinctive storytelling. The frenetic energy in his works on paper, evident in Untitled, differs from that of his paintings—here, expression is immediate, raw, and intense.

Drawing was Basquiat’s most direct mode of translating his thoughts. Evocative of Cy Twombly—whom he admired—Basquiat’s marks suggest a proto-handwriting, an elusive language suspended between legibility and pure symbolism ... Through recursive anatomy, television, history, and Black culture, Basquiat constructed a symbolic system all his own.

Created during a pivotal period in the artist’s short yet prolific career, Untitled captures Basquiat’s creative expansion and growing confidence in his role as an artist, at a time when he was gaining international recognition and staging major museum exhibitions,” Phillips concludes.

Artwork: Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Untitled” (1985-1986).

Interview Magazine takes us back to December 19, 1985, the night Jean-Michel and Eric Goode threw their joint birthday p...
09/16/2026

Interview Magazine takes us back to December 19, 1985, the night Jean-Michel and Eric Goode threw their joint birthday party at Area in New York City. Featured in the article are direct quotes from people who were there to celebrate with him:

JENNIFER GOODE (AREA DESIGNER): I organized the party. I’m sure Eric did the invitations because he knew who he wanted to invite. I did the flowers for it, because I would always do flowers.

ERIC GOODE (AREA FOUNDER): Jean-Michel’s birthday was the 22nd of December, and mine was the 19th. So we would do our birthday parties together. That drawing he did, for whatever reason, was the invitation to one of the birthday parties.

JENNIFER GOODE: I put together a slideshow of photos of Jean-Michel and photos of Eric. I got all these slides from Jean-Michel—baby pictures, whatever he had. We had this projector in the lounge.

TONY SHAFRAZI (GALLERIST): Area was on Hudson Street just below Canal. As you entered the building, there was a long corridor about 5 or 6 feet wide, with about 15 or 18 feet of glass vitrines on either side filled with different theatrical sets. These were quite impressive because you knew you were entering something visual—it made it more of an experience.

JENNIFER GOODE: Jean-Michel was DJing that night. Probably everybody was exiting that lounge because what he would DJ was very eclectic. It was jazz, it was be-bop, reggae—which people could probably tolerate—but when it got to some of the jazz, no.

JOHNNY DYNELL (DJ): He was such a character. He would be playing John Coltrane, just crazy stuff. [Laughs] And everybody would be like, “Oh god. Can you tell him to stop?” And I would say, “Jean-Michel, you can’t play Charlie Parker.” And he’d be like, “If they can’t dance to Charlie Parker, then they can’t dance.”

Photo Courtesy of Interview Magazine. Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jennifer Goode, 1985. Photographed by Volker Hinz ©. Courtesy of the Volker Hinz estate, Hamburg, Germany.

Source: Interview Magazine, “‘He Was the Center of Attention’: Basquiat at Area, by the People Who Were There,” October 18, 2024.

In 2006, Deitch Projects opened the exhibition, “Jean-Michel Basquiat 1981: The Studio of the Street,” curated by Glenn ...
09/14/2026

In 2006, Deitch Projects opened the exhibition, “Jean-Michel Basquiat 1981: The Studio of the Street,” curated by Glenn O’Brien and Diego Cortez. According to Deitch Projects:

“This exhibition… [included] works that show Basquiat’s progression from text alone to both text and image, from materials found on the street to traditional large painted canvases, and from pure drawing to his uniquely evocative hybrid of drawing and painting.

Many motifs in the exhibition pointed to Basquiat’s early focus on the urban streetscape. Tenement buildings, doors, windows, fire escapes, and fender benders made up most of the content of these early works. Not only did the view from Basquiat’s Brooklyn backyard window shape the characters in these pieces, but many of the artworks were physically made of things he found on the street as well: scraps of paper, shopping bags, doors, and salvaged wood.

Basquiat’s exploration related closely to what was going on in New York’s music scene at the time, when New Wave musicians like Arto Lindsay and James White and the Blacks broke sound down to its basics to reinvent musical expression. Basquiat was doing similar things with painting and drawing: deconstructing work into disjointed symbols, paring down meaning to text and image, and uncovering the skeleton of painting by insistently bringing forward the drawing beneath.”

All artwork by Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Event invitation care of Deitch Projects.

Source: Deitch Projects Exhibition Archive 1996-2010

Here is an excerpt from The Guardian entitled, “Armani suits and bare feet: how Jean-Michel Basquiat created his look,” ...
09/11/2026

Here is an excerpt from The Guardian entitled, “Armani suits and bare feet: how Jean-Michel Basquiat created his look,” written by Simon Chilvers in 2017:

“Basquiat’s wardrobe was distinctive, whether he was in mismatched blazer and trousers with striped shirt and clashing tie, or patterned shirt with a leather jacket pushed off his shoulders. He was perhaps most recognisable in his paint-splattered Armani suits. ‘I loved the fact that he chose to wear Armani. And loved even more that he painted in my suits,’ Giorgio Armani says. ‘I design clothes to be worn, for people to live in, and he certainly did!’

“In many ways, this bricolage approach to clothing is akin to the way he created his art. ‘His work was a mysterious combination of elements – text and colour, historical reference, abstraction and figurative techniques,’ Armani says. ‘In his life, he also mashed up creative activities – he was a graffiti artist, a musician, an actor, a maker of great artworks. This eclecticism made him a mysterious and unconventional man. That mix made him stand out.’”

Photo: Lizzie Himmel

Source: Simon Chilvers for The Guardian, “Armani suits and bare feet: how Jean-Michel Basquiat created his look,” September 12, 2017.

This is an excerpt from Phillips regarding Jean-Michel’s artwork, Back of the Neck (1983):“A masterpiece hailing from Ba...
09/09/2026

This is an excerpt from Phillips regarding Jean-Michel’s artwork, Back of the Neck (1983):

“A masterpiece hailing from Basquiat’s printmaking practice, Back of the Neck not only incorporates the artist’s sourcebook of signs – the writing, the anatomical sketches, the copyright symbol, the three-pointed crown – but furthermore boasts a fraught and taut energy that recalls the overarching sense of violence that invaded the air of New York City and the United States in the early to mid-1980s.

Conceived the same year that the twenty-five-year-old black graffiti artist Michael Stewart was arrested and beaten to death while in New York police custody, Back of the Neck addresses the politics of violence surrounding the black body: the contortions, assaults and defacement it too often undergoes.

Basquiat was obsessed ‘with the black male body’s history as property, pulverized meat and popular entertainment’, wrote Greg Tate.”

Artwork: (full and detail) Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Back of the Neck” (1983).

Jean-Michel stands in front of one of his collaborations with Andy Warhol, who snapped this photo in 1984.By then the tw...
09/07/2026

Jean-Michel stands in front of one of his collaborations with Andy Warhol, who snapped this photo in 1984.

By then the two of them were deep into a body of work that would eventually total around 160 paintings made together.

The piece behind him, “Ailing Ali in Fight of Life,” is acrylic on canvas, 76 x 105 inches — one of the larger canvases from that run.

Photo: Andy Warhol (1984).

Artwork: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, “Ailing Ali in Fight of Life” (1984).

Jean-Michel painted Cabra in 1981–82. The title is a pun, and the painting is about a boxing match.Sotheby’s writes: “Ex...
09/04/2026

Jean-Michel painted Cabra in 1981–82. The title is a pun, and the painting is about a boxing match.

Sotheby’s writes: “Executed at a time when Basquiat was exploring his Haitian and Puerto Rican roots, and becoming increasingly interested in the power and scrutiny of black athletes, the present work belongs to a group of paintings inspired by boxing icons including Muhammad Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, Jersey Joe Walcott and others.

Cabra is unique in its articulation of a historic evening in 1970 when Muhammad Ali – the greatest of all time – knocked out revered heavy-weight fighter Oscar Bonavena, also known as ‘The Bull’.

The iconic boxing ring, the hieroglyphic ‘TKO’ above the bull’s skull and, finally, the clever play on words – Cabra is Spanish for ‘goat’ or GOAT, shorthand for the Greatest of All Time, Muhammad Ali – all add to this physiologically searing and visually-moving painting of one of Basquiat’s long-time heroes.”

Artwork: Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Cabra” (1981-1982).

Reflecting on Jean-Michel’s relevance in the world today, writer Ted Loos shared, “We are certainly living in such a mom...
09/02/2026

Reflecting on Jean-Michel’s relevance in the world today, writer Ted Loos shared, “We are certainly living in such a moment of Basquiat mania, judging by the artist’s recent museum shows and auction records.”

“Basquiat was among the first black artists to establish a top-level name in the market and with museums; he was included in the Whitney Biennial in 1983, when he was 22… His large, riveting canvases were expressionistic but also somewhat Pop, filled with graffiti-like signs and symbols, mixing mysterious text and images. He wasn’t contained by any known categories: He was sui generis.”

Loos concludes, “With Basquiat, the elusive quality that people say they’re looking for in politicians and everyone else, authenticity, comes through like a beam of midsummer sunlight.”

Photo: William Coupon (1986).

Source: Ted Loos for 1stDibs, “What Does Jean-Michel Basquiat Mean to Us Today?” September 29, 2019.

In “Elaine” (1985), Jean-Michel surrounds a single portrait with more than a dozen sheets from his own notebooks — photo...
08/31/2026

In “Elaine” (1985), Jean-Michel surrounds a single portrait with more than a dozen sheets from his own notebooks — photocopied and applied directly to the canvas.

As Christie’s writes: “This outpouring of creativity fills almost every square inch of the canvas and as such, Elaine becomes an encyclopedia of sorts, a tool to unlock the rich and detailed references contained throughout the artist’s body of work.”

At the center, Elaine’s face is built from “multiple layers of different dark pigments... to reflect the natural subtleties of human skin,” her lipstick and eyeshadow picked out fast, in oilstick. Around her, the notebook pages carry his recurring vocabulary — a foot, a skull with its brain exposed, monkeys and bears — alongside lists of words: rye, wheat, oats, rice, millet, grain, set against industrial names like Westinghouse, Packard, Hudson and Ford.

Curator Richard Marshall wrote that Jean-Michel “continually selected and injected into his works words which held charged references and meanings — particularly to his deep-rooted concerns about race, human rights, the creation of power and wealth, and the control and valuation of natural elements, animals and produce.”

Artwork: Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Elaine” (1985).

Source: Christie’s; R. Marshall, “Repelling Ghosts,” in Jean-Michel Basquiat, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992, p. 15.

This portrait of Jean-Michel with Bruno Bischofberger was taken in Zurich in 1982, on the occasion of Jean-Michel’s firs...
08/28/2026

This portrait of Jean-Michel with Bruno Bischofberger was taken in Zurich in 1982, on the occasion of Jean-Michel’s first exhibition at Galerie Bruno Bischofberger.

As Hauser & Wirth writes: “After his first exhibition with Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in 1982, the same year Basquiat became one of the youngest ever artists to participate at Documenta in Kassel, the influences of the disparate cultural landscapes of New York City and Switzerland began to take shape in his work, incorporating the motifs of ski lifts, fir trees, mountains and German phrases into his expansive visual lexicon.”

Bischofberger himself recalled the visits that followed: “From then on, Jean-Michel Basquiat often visited me in Switzerland, where he particularly liked it. About half a dozen times in Zurich and exactly seven times in St. Moritz, four of them in the summer.”

Photo: Beth Phillips (1982).

Source: Hauser & Wirth, “Jean-Michel Basquiat. Engadin.”

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