One of the most important artists of the late twentieth century, Jean-Michel Basquiat explored the interplay of words and images throughout his career as a celebrated painter with an instantly recognizable style. In his paintings, notebooks, and interviews, he showed himself to be a powerful and creative writer and speaker as well as image-maker. Basquiat-isms is a collection of essential quotations from this godfather of urban culture. In these brief, compelling, and memorable selections, taken from his interviews as well as his visual and written works, Basquiat writes and speaks about culture, his artistic persona, the art world, artistic influence, race, urban life, and many other subjects. Concise, direct, forceful, poetic, and enigmatic, Basquiat’s words, like his art, continue to resonate.
Select quotations from the book:
- “I cross out words so you will see them more; the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them.”
- “I think there are a lot of people that are neglected in art, I don’t know if it’s because of who made the paintings or what, but, um … black people are never really portrayed realistically or I mean not even portrayed in modern art.”
- “Since I was 17, I thought I might be a star.”
- “The more I paint the more I like everything.”
- “I think I make art for myself, but ultimately I think I make it for the world.”
Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88) was an American artist. He has been the subject of retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Serpentine Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, the Foundation Beyeler, Fondation Louis Vuitton, and the Barbican, among other venues, and his work is in the permanent collections of major museums around the world. Larry Warsh is the editor of Basquiat’s Notebooks and two books by Ai Weiwei, Humanity and Weiwei-isms (all Princeton). Warsh was an early collector of Basquiat and a member of the Basquiat Authentication Committee.
"As an artist, the most precious thing is what’s in the mind. Basquiat’s sentences in this book are so delicate and not wasted. They show his inner world truthfully and precisely, why he was a unique person and a unique artist. I love this book."—Ai Weiwei
"[Warsh] makes the contents sound good, too: 'this book provides a glimpse into Basquiat’s incredible mind . . . . May his words and thoughts enliven your thinking today as much as they have inspired me for many decades.'"—Times Literary Supplement
"Basquiat-isms contains Basquiat’s most important quotes, which reveal much about his way of seeing and thinking. A great reference book that provides an intimate and personal glimpse into the ideas of one of the leading artists of our time."—Dieter Buchhart, The Art Newspaper
"A wonderful book, Basquiat-isms brings us closer to understanding Basquiat's experiences as an artist and as a black man. We see glimpses of the artist's wit and his ideas about painting in equal measure."—Jordana Moore Saggese, author of Reading Basquiat
"This important and entertaining book exposes Basquiat's preoccupations, his creative contradictions, his humor, and his soul. To hear him explaining his artistic process, methods of revision, and sense of the world is to hear a voice of wisdom beyond his age."—Adam Bradley, author of Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop
