In less than a decade, Jean-Michel Basquiat went from sleeping on the streets of New York City to hanging his paintings in its priciest art galleries. Even though he had no formal training, the Brooklyn native revolutionized the art world with his big, bold, graffiti-inspired artwork.
Basquiat’s journey from teenage graffiti artist to international superstar began in a cramped crawl space under the stairs of the four-story Brooklyn brownstone where he lived with his parents and two younger sisters. The crawl space served as Jean-Michel’s bedroom.
There was a mattress on the floor—and in fact, the mattress was the floor—and a comic-book-style drawing on the surface of every wall. This was Jean-Michel’s fortress of solitude, and his first studio.
Jean-Michel began drawing at the age of three, using paper that his father, Gerard, brought home from the accounting firm where he worked. Jean-Michel’s earliest subjects were television cartoon characters from the 1960s, like Fred Flintstone and Bullwinkle. His first art teacher was his mother, Matilde, who had a keen eye for color and had once worked as a clothing designer. She spent many hours drawing with her son, showing Jean-Michel how to copy scenes from the family Bible onto paper napkins.
When Jean-Michel was a little older, Matilde took him to the great art museums of New York City, like the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. By age six, Jean-Michel was already enrolled as a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. He even had a favorite painting: Guernica by Pablo Picasso. He could also speak three languages: English, Spanish, and French. He was a renaissance kid.
Jean-Michel decided early on that he wanted to be a cartoonist when he grew up. At school, he spent most of his time doodling in a notebook. The other kids knew he was the class artist because he always walked around with several pencils sticking out of his hair.
When he was only seven, Jean-Michel completed his own children’s book with his friend Mark Prozzo. He also created a comic strip with ten characters, including a mad scientist named Mr. Oopick. Not only that, but he drew ace caricatures of famous people, including the movie director Alfred Hitchcock and Alfred E. Neumann, the gap-toothed mascot of Mad magazine. He mailed one of his drawings to J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI in Washington D.C., hoping perhaps for recognition from the federal government. Hoover never replied.
Yet as devoted as he was to his craft, Jean-Michel was far from the best artist in his class. His drawings were often sloppy and needlessly abstract. He never won any painting contests. “I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect Spider-Man,” he recalled. Though he yearned to be the best, he had not yet found the best way to express himself.
Sometimes it takes many years for an artist to develop a unique style. Other times, inspiration hits all at once. In Jean-Michel’s case, it happened literally by accident. One day shortly after his seventh birthday, Jean-Michel was playing ball in the street when a car careened out of control and struck him. He was rushed to the hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with a broken arm and serious internal injuries. A surgeon determined that Jean-Michel’s spleen had to be removed—and fast.
The surgery went smoothly, but Jean-Michel spent the next month recovering in his hospital bed. To keep him occupied, Jean-Michel’s mother gave him a copy of a classic medical textbook called Gray’s Anatomy. The book was filled with detailed drawings of the inner workings of the human body, and it fascinated Jean-Michel. He studied it day and night, memorizing the names of the various bones and body parts depicted in the pages: the tibia, the femur, the aorta, and so on.
When he left the hospital, Jean-Michel brought the book home. It would remain with him always, a permanent reference he turned to again and again as he moved beyond cartoon drawings toward bolder, more sophisticated renderings of the human form.
In fact, many of Jean-Michel’s paintings display what’s been called his “X-ray vision” effect. They depict skeletons and skulls, covered with words, letters, and diagrams, just like the illustrations in Gray’s Anatomy. Jean-Michel was so excited by his favorite book that he even formed a rock band named Gray, in its honor.
Jean-Michel had found a source of inspiration, but it would take time before he could harness his creativity to make art. The rest of his childhood was tumultuous and unhappy. Soon after he went home from the hospital, his parents decided to separate. Left in the custody of his father, who paid little attention to him, Jean-Michel grew increasingly angry and began to act out at home and at school. His grades suffered, and he was the only student to fail ninth-grade life-drawing class.
Increasingly isolated from friends and family, Jean-Michel ran away several times. He pulled pranks and got in trouble. He was even expelled from high school for dumping a box of shaving cream on the principal’s head during the graduation ceremony.
By the age of seventeen, Jean-Michel was homeless, earning a meager living selling T-shirts and handmade postcards. His only means of expressing himself was by spray-painting graffiti on the sides of abandoned buildings. In an era when street art was just coming into fashion, that activity proved to be Jean-Michel’s ticket to success.
In 1980, Jean-Michel met Andy Warhol, the Pop Art pioneer. Andy shared Jean-Michel’s childlike view of the world and helped expose his new friend’s work to museums and art collectors. Soon people were paying top dollar to display Jean-Michel’s graffiti artworks in their galleries. Some even asked him to decorate their homes. Jean-Michel traveled all over Europe and around the United States on special commissions from wealthy art patrons. He became one of the most recognizable artists of the 1980s.
It took only a few years for Jean-Michel to go from spraying his “tag” all over lower Manhattan to selling his paintings for millions of dollars and changing the face of contemporary art. When he died in 1988 at the age of twenty-seven, the name that he had once spray-painted on walls was known all over the world.