The shelves are filled with fiction that goes deep into the artistic and personal history of Jean-Michel Basquiat, a pioneer of American graffiti art elevated to a respected art form, collectible and exhibited in the world’s most important museums.
If the friendships with Andy Warhol and Keith Haring are now told by many of the participants of the New York art scene of the ’80s, if the love story with Madonna is part of the more pop side of the historiography related to Basquiat, on April 9 in Manhattan opens an exhibition that reveals more intimate aspects of the painter, through the photographs of the family album. The project is called “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure©” and is curated by the artist’s younger sisters Lisane and Jeanine, who experienced him first as a shy and joking older brother, then as a world-renowned artist.
More than 200 unpublished works including shots and artifacts related to the family of SAMO©, from the relationship of friendship with his father Gerard to that with his mother Matilde, the one who has sparked the art to the little Basquiat taking him around the museums of New York.
Through the photos of the family you can retrace the years in Flatbush and then in Boerum Hill from 1972. Some shots also show the two years in Puerto Rico, where the family had moved for a job opportunity for his father Gerard. The return to Brooklyn in 1976 coincides with the beginning of the first serious artistic experiments, which will lead to the first work sold to Warhol in 1979 (Stupid Games, Bad Ideas) and the first solo exhibition in 1982 at Annina Nosei Gallery.
The exhibition tells of a Jean-Michel Basquiat amused in building snowmen in the middle of the street, or picking apples with the whole family. The portraits with the two little sisters in his arms give back a family atmosphere easy to grasp for many, as told by the two curators in an article on Wepresent. An exhibition that is the opposite of pop, a container in which Basquiat has often been placed, not a collective spirit but a minimal nucleus of affection and creativity.
