Brooklyn-born Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) was one of the most important artists of the 1980s. A key figure in the New York art scene, he inventively explored the interplay between words and images throughout his career, first as a member of SAMO, a graffiti group active on the Lower East Side in the late 1970s, and then as a painter acclaimed for his unmistakable Neoexpressionist style. From 1980 to 1987, he filled numerous working notebooks with drawings and handwritten texts. This facsimile edition reproduces the pages of these fascinating and rarely seen notebooks for the first time.
"Jean-Michel Basquiat's journals are, by turns, cryptic, revelatory, beautiful, and unsettling. They provide a rare point of entry into the life and imagination of one of the twentieth century's most gifted and enigmatic artists." - Adam Bradley, University of Colorado, Boulder, and author of Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop