Basquiat : The Life and Death of an Art Star - Softcover

Hoban, Phoebe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0704380722 ISBN 13: 9780704380721

Publisher: Quartet, 1998

Synopsis

Phoebe Hoban presents an in-depth account of the tormented artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and his dizzying rise to fame during the glitzy, glamorous and decadent decade of consumption and indulgence in the 1980s.

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: Quartet
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0704380722
• ISBN 13: 9780704380721
• Binding: Paperback