Jean-Michel Basquiat—artist and art world provocateur—took New York City by storm with his powerful and complex works that relentlessly engaged with charged sociopolitical issues, including race, police brutality, and structural inequity. In this important volume, devoted to an exhibition at the Brant Foundation in their newly opened Manhattan outpost featuring the artist’s key works, Basquiat’s art returns to its East Village roots, contextualized for the first time in decades in the very neighborhood that served as one of his greatest inspirations.
Dieter Buchhart, noted Basquiat scholar and curator, brings together one hundred of the artist’s most important works, focusing on the best examples of the many subjects that informed Basquiat’s work, from jazz, anatomy, sports figures, comics, classical literature, the African diaspora, and art history. The exhibition partially restages three of the artist’s critical early shows, including an exhibition of the artist’s paintings and drawings of heads at Robert Miller Gallery; his most important canvases from Gagosian Gallery’s 1982 show in Los Angeles; and Basquiat’s solo show at Fun Gallery in the East Village. Buchhart also considers in-depth the artist’s so-called stretcher bar paintings, in which the normally hidden wooden supports for stretched canvases are exposed, works that have yet to be explored at length by scholars. In so doing, Buchhart offers a critical assessment of the enduring importance and legacy of the artist’s work.
Dr. Dr. Dieter Buchhart(b. 1971; Vienna, Austria) is a curator, art historian, and art theorist. He has curated major exhibitions on Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Alexander Calder in internationally renowned museums such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; the Albertina, Vienna; the Art Gallery of Ontario; and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Dr. Dr. Buchhart holds two doctorates in art history and art conservation. From 2007 to 2009, he was director of the Kunsthalle Krems near Vienna. Since 1999, Dr. Dr. Buchhart has written numerous art reviews and monographs and conducted interviews forKunstforum Internationaland other art magazines. As an art theorist, he has contributed many catalog essays, magazine articles, and lectures. His main areas of research range from Expressionism and art around 1900 to art from the 1980s to the present. He is a leading expert on the fundamental research on Jean-Michel Basquiat’s artworks.
