Books by Dieter Buchhart
Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks
by Dieter Buchhart, Tricia Bloom
Accompanying a major traveling exhibition, this first-ever survey of the rarely seen notebooks of Basquiat features the artist’s handwritten notes, poems, and drawings, along with related works on paper and large-scale paintings. With no formal training, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) succeeded in developing a new and expressive style to become one of the most influential artists in the postmodern revival of figurative during the 1980s. In a series of notebooks from the early to mid-1980s, never before exhibited, Basquiat combined text and images reflecting his engagement with the countercultures of graffiti and hip-hop in New York City, as well as pop culture and world events. Filled with handwritten texts, poems, pictograms, and drawings, many of them iconic images that recur throughout his artwork—teepees, crowns, skeleton-like silhouettes, and grimacing masks—and these notebooks reveal much about the artist’s creative process and the importance of the written word in his aesthetic. With over 150 notebook pages and numerous drawings and paintings, this important book sheds new light on Basquiat’s career and his critical place in contemporary art history.
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Keith Haring - Jean Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines
An exploration of the personal and artistic connections between two icons of twentieth-century art
Keith Haring (1958–1990) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) changed the art world of the 1980s through their idiosyncratic imagery, radical ideas, and complex sociopolitical commentary. Each artist invented a distinct visual language, employing signs, symbols, and words to convey strong messages in unconventional ways, and each left an indelible legacy that remains a force in contemporary visual and popular culture. Offering fascinating new insights into the artists’ work, Keith Haring | Jean-Michel Basquiat reveals the many intersections among Haring and Basquiat’s lives, ideas, and practices.
This lavishly illustrated volume brings together more than two hundred images―works created in public spaces, paintings, sculptures, objects, works on paper, photographs, and more. These rich visuals are accompanied by essays and interviews from renowned scholars, artists, and art critics, exploring the reach and range of Haring and Basquiat’s influence.
Keith Haring | Jean-Michel Basquiat provides a valuable look at two artistic peers and boundary breakers whose tragically short but prolific careers left their marks on the art world and beyond.
Distributed for the National Gallery of Victoria in association with No More Rulers
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Jean-Michel Basquiat: Xerox
by Dieter Buchhart, Christopher Stackhouse, Eric Robertson
Copy, paste: Basquiat's collaged Xerox paintings presage today's sampling aesthetics
Jean-Michel Basquiat: Xerox provides the first concentrated examination of the extraordinary body of work that the artist created using Xerox copies as his principal medium and compositional focal point. These immersive, collaged Xerox paintings epitomize Basquiat’s extraordinary instinct for visual language. Their raw, allover compositions incorporate recycled and transformed signs and markings from the artist’s everyday experiences, including motifs from his earlier artworks.
The intricate web of content in this series presages the copy-paste sampling characteristic of the subsequent internet and post-internet generations, positioning Basquiat as a pioneer of the pre-digital age.
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88) grew up in Brooklyn. Notoriety came early, from his street paintings made under the tag SAMO. Later he stormed the gallery world, and became an icon of New York's vibrant early-’80s downtown scene, a friend to and collaborator with Andy Warhol and Francesco Clemente, and the cover boy for a 1985 New York Times Magazine story on the new art market. He died following a heroin overdose at 27.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat: Words Are All We Have
Language in the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, from graffiti to word as motif
In the wild New York of the 1980s, Jean-Michel Basquiat was the first African-American artist to receive art-world attention. The complexity and trailblazing innovative power of his paintings has been widely discussed, but this book focuses on the treatment of language in Basquiat’s ouevre. With its complex structures, spontaneous rhythms and sampled, collage-like manifestations, his work was drawn into the orbit of the Beat Generation poets and the protagonists of the musical avant-garde. The multitalented Basquiat created a shimmering, syncopated fabric of images and text, which the American curator and critic Robert Storr aptly called “eye rap.” It was with this unpretentious and spontaneous way of working that Basquiat rewrote art history.
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Basquiat: By Himself
An American artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88) first made a name for himself as part of a graffiti duo who wrote enigmatic epigrams on the Manhattan’s Lower East Side during the 1970s, a place and time that saw the coalescence of hip hop, punk, and street art cultures. By the 1980s, his neo-expressionist paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums across the globe.
Encompassing Basquiat’s lifelong intensive study of the self, Basquiat: By Himself is dedicated to the expressive self-portraits he created. These portraits are regarded as being among the most important of his radical creative works, and the essays here examine some fifty specific portraits of himself, as well as the concealed reproductions of the artist that can be found in his series of likenesses of African American men. As this book reveals, these similarities were produced by a man who, himself affected by everyday racism, identified with the heroes, saints, and martyrs he portrayed. Within these key works, we can see Basquiat’s focus on identity, discrimination, and prejudice to capitalism, the market, and oppression.
Featuring 120 color images, Basquiat: By Himself is the first book to examine the central position Basquiat’s self-portraits hold within his oeuvre and sheds new light on the works of this intriguing artist.
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Basquiat: Boom for Real
by Eleanor Nairne, Dieter Buchhart
Now available in paperback, this exciting book charts Jean-Michel Basquiat's groundbreaking career.
Basquiat first came to prominence when he collaborated with Al Diaz to spray-paint enigmatic statements under the pseudonym SAMO©. From there he went on to work with others on collages, Xerox art, postcards, performances, and music before establishing his reputation as one of the most important painters of his generation. This book places his collaborations in a wider art historical context and looks at his career through the lens of performance. Six thematic chapters offer compelling research, with essays from poet Christian Campbell on SAMO©; curator Carlo McCormick on New York/New Wave; writer Glenn O'Brien on the downtown scene; academic Jordana Moore Saggese on Basquiat's relationship to film and television; and music scholar Francesco Martinelli on Basquiat's obsession with jazz. This insightful survey also features rare archival material and extensive illustrations, demonstrating how Basquiat's legacy remains more powerful and relevant than ever today.
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Basquiat The Modena Paintings
by Dieter Buchhart, Fiona Hesse, Michiko Kono, Regula Moser, Demetrio Paparoni, Jordana Moore Saggese
Unzählige Publikationen und Ausstellungen beschäftigen sich mit Jean-Michel Basquiats Leben und Werk, doch eine Episode blieb bisher weitgehend unberücksichtigt: Im Sommer 1982 reiste der New Yorker Künstler auf Einladung des Galeristen Emilio Mazzoli für eine seiner frühen Einzelausstellungen in Europa ins italienische Modena. Innerhalb weniger Tage malte er dort eine Gruppe großformatiger Gemälde, die sein vorheriges Schaffen nicht nur hinsichtlich ihres Maßstabes übertrafen. Jeweils mindestens zwei mal vier Meter groß, markieren sie den Übergang vom Graffiti-Sprayen in den Straßen Manhattans zum Malen auf Leinwand. Zugleich sind sie Ausdruck des Findens einer Identität als Künstler. Die Gemälde – darunter Meisterwerke, die heute als die Herausragendsten seines Œuvre gelten – wurden nie zusammen gezeigt. Dieser Katalog beleuchtet mit Basquiats Italienaufenthalt einen entscheidenden Moment in seiner Karriere und führt die acht Gemälde erstmals wieder zusammen.
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Jean-Michel Basquiat Of Symbols and Signs
by Dieter Buchhart, Antonia Hoerschelmann
This exciting, color-filled retrospective monograph offers new insights into Basquiat’s unique visual language and helps illuminate messages about political and social issues that feel as urgent today as they did a half-century ago.
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s symbolic, complex, and often emotionally charged work made a huge impact on the 1980s downtown New York City art scene. And though his all-too-brief career ended when he died at age 27, Basquiat left behind an enormous legacy—not only in the number of works he produced, but also in the messages he encoded around political, social, racial, and cultural issues.
This exciting book shows how Basquiat used an intricate network of signs and symbols to challenge the very system that made him a darling of the art world. It traces his inspiration from cartoons, children’s drawings, and advertising as well as his own Haitian and Puerto Rican heritage; discusses the influence of African-American, African, and Aztec cultural histories; and shows how Basquiat incorporated into his work classical themes and contemporary icons—from athletes to musicians. What becomes clear is how, even as a young man, Basquiat had a profound understanding of the artist’s role in art history, and of his unique position as a young Black artist in a world of racism, suppression and social injsutice.
This book helps readers decode Basquiat’s unique lingua franca, an intoxicating body of work brimming with social commentary that was in turns incisive, angry, comic, hip, and heartbreaking, and that remains powerful and meaningful today.
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