The exhibition is organized chronologically

He was once a graffiteur promised to become an international star. It was once Jean-Michel Basquiat, an American of Haitian and Puerto Rican origin that the French love as a child of the country. It has been shown as early as 1985 in Paris, at the Museum of Modern Art, and here it is back.

The Jean-Michel Basquiat painter died at twenty-eight years as a result of an overdose. It is said that his career truly began in 1981. In the meantime he has produced many, quickly and not always well. The Museum of Modern Art in the city of Paris shows to January 30, a set of 85 paintings and 70 drawings very selected to keep the best recollection of this Comet of art who has painted unparalleled.

A lover of art

Can look at this exhibition superficially and enjoy the magic of signs Jean Michel casts on the canvas. The Freestyle way launched words, colours that collide with the other. You can switch without understanding and take a simple visual pleasure. The alternative is to scrutinize the vocabulary that it puts in place.

The exhibition is organized chronologically. Thus begins the Basquiat graffiti. Until 1979 he signed on the walls of New York "Samo" for "same old shit" in the company of one of his accomplices, Al Diaz. Initials that refer to marijuana smoked at the time. 1980-1981: painting on canvas, Panel painting, painting on refrigerator... The composition is still simplistic. A painting by 1980 fixed on a wooden bar and the background is not painted shows a car accident. As in a child drawing: shapes are incomplete. Only the shock of the two cars is literally and figuratively.

Bruno Bischofberger, the historic Swiss merchant of the painter, has kept a relic: a dirty fridge works without care but who is already a major element of the vocabulary Basquiat: death head. Already the obsession of the endangered "No", replied the curator of the exhibition, Dieter Buchkart. At the age of eight years the small Jean-Michel, who had been victim of a car accident is hospitalized. His mother made him gift of an anatomy book, one that inspires him to draw all heads of death. It is a boy of middle-class black, from divorced parents. His mother likes to draw scenes from the Bible. It has become a designer of cartoons. He spent fifteen years painting. A disturbed ado taking acids on a bench. The clock is ticking. It also goes in museums.

In 1985, in an interview with Becky Johnston appeared in the catalogue he says: "I think that go"guernica", it was what I preferred when I was a kid." I appreciated also much Rauschenberg when I lived in the Lower East Side. "Basquiat recounts his memories of amateur of art. They implement the puzzle of his inspiration.

At the time the great fresco of Picasso, Guernica, had not yet returned in Spain. A giant painting, which expresses the violence and the movement by a multitude of characters in extreme postures that express the tragedy. Rauschenberg, he is the inventor of a cycle of major paintings between 1953 and 1964, the "Combine paintings" (shown at the Centre Pompidou in 2006), which mix of anarchic but ultimately harmonious way painting and objects of any kind to tell a story.

From minimalism

This must be added the musical context that bathes the young Jean-Michel. In 1982, he produced even a disc of rap while he is DJ in several boxes of the crazy New York nights. Dieter Buchkart explains that the artist putting in place its composition as it would the music: "he of the sampling and scratching.". Sampling: it re-use an extract in another context. The scratching is to change the speed of the music.

Basquiat recycles a multitude of images, writings and signs. "It cannot always explain what he wrote." He is borrowing at different universe, a "comic books" in the textbooks of anatomy. He worked on different levels of color. He meets and repaints. "And it can assemble panels made of different stories. That is, if a table is not a straight story. Basquiat said: "When I arrived, the art was essentially minimalism, which disrupted me a little." It seemed to me that this type of art cut a few of the people. That it away the art of most people.

Comet Jean-Michel Basquiat has managed the feat back by his paintings all spectators to paint.

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