Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art - Hardcover

Hoban, Phoebe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670854778 ISBN 13: 9780670854776

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1998

Synopsis

The tragic story of the talented painter Jean-Michel Basquiat details his turbulent childhood, explosive dealings with the elite art world, relationships with such figures as Andy Warhol and Madonna, and rise to fame, which led to his death from a drug overdose at the age of twenty-seven. 12,000 first printing.

About this title

Review:

This minutely reported book is as much a portrait of the frenzied, prodigal New York art world of the 1980s as it is a biography of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died of a drug overdose at age 27 in 1988. Basquiat, one of very few African American artists to acquire an international reputation, left a thick web of dealers, collectors, friends, lovers, paintings, drawings, and used syringes behind him. Author Phoebe Hoban seems to have unblinkingly interviewed or examined them all. While she duly registers Basquiat's sad childhood, with his unstable Puerto Rican mother and punishing Haitian father, she doesn't make much of the deeper veins of sorrow and self-destruction that may have motivated the artist and informed his art. Rather, she allows his celebrity, which whisked him from street urchin to art star, to be the central trajectory of this story. The Warhol protégé would probably approve, as he was the primary obliterator of his own psychological depths, throwing away his short, phenomenally productive life in the edgy club and drug scene of downtown Manhattan. The miracle is that Basquiat was so good, and so serious, an artist, surrounded as he was by hype and cash. Hoban's book is a fluid, intricate, authoritative dissection of a time, a place, and--almost--a person. --Peggy Moorman

About the Author:

Phoebe Hoban is a New York-based journalist. She is the author of several books, including a biography of the artist Alice Neel.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0670854778
• ISBN 13: 9780670854776
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400