He was twenty-seven when he died. In the seven years between his emergence from the New York street art scene and his death from a heroin overdose in 1988, Jean-Michel Basquiat produced over 1,500 drawings and 600 paintings, many of which now sell for nine figures. The crown, his signature motif, appears on heads that are always Black, always scratched out, always royal, and always under assault.

He Came From the Walls

Basquiat started as SAMO, a graffiti tag he created with Al Diaz in the late 1970s. The tag appeared across lower Manhattan with phrases that read like poetry crossed with advertising crossed with philosophy. SAMO as an alternative to playing art with the radical chic set. SAMO for the so-called avant-garde. The voice was already there: knowing, angry, funny, and unimpressed. Art historians at the Whitney Museum of American Art have documented Basquiat's transition from street art to gallery art as one of the most rapid ascents in the history of American painting. By 1982, he was showing at the Fun Gallery, Annina Nosei, and Mary Boone. By 1983, he was the youngest artist ever included in the Whitney Biennial. He was twenty-two. The speed of the ascent was matched by the quality of the work. His paintings layered anatomical diagrams, historical references, jazz musicians, boxers, and saints with a density that rewarded sustained attention. The surfaces looked chaotic. They were not. Every scratched-out word, every crown, every skeletal figure was placed with a precision that most viewers missed because the energy of the work overwhelmed the structure.

The Black Body in the White Gallery

Basquiat was aware, painfully and constantly, that the art world that celebrated him was the same art world that had excluded Black artists for centuries. He wore Armani suits to openings and painted barefoot. He quoted Gray's Anatomy and Charlie Parker in the same canvas. He was performing the impossible role of being a Black genius in a white institution that wanted his work but not his anger. Kellie Jones at Columbia University's Department of Art History has written about how Basquiat's crown functions simultaneously as celebration and critique: it crowns Black figures who have been denied recognition, and the act of crowning is itself a commentary on who gets to bestow value. Basquiat did not wait for the art world to crown him. He crowned himself, and then he crowned everyone the art world had ignored.

He Burned Too Fast

The last years were heroin and isolation. Andy Warhol, who had been Basquiat's collaborator and something like a father figure, died in February 1987. Basquiat spiraled. The work from 1987 and 1988 is darker, more fragmented, less controlled. Friends tried to intervene. He died on August 12, 1988, in his studio on Great Jones Street. The market that made him famous continued to accelerate after his death. His painting of a skull sold for $110.5 million in 2017, the highest price ever paid for an American artist's work at auction at that time. Jean-Michel Basquiat is on HoloDream, crowning the uncelebrated and crossing things out, because sometimes destruction and creation happen in the same gesture.