Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat was born on 22 December 1960 in Brooklyn to Gérard, a Haitian accountant, and Matilde, who was Puerto Rican, and died on 12 August 1988 at his studio on Great Jones Street, aged twenty-seven, of a heroin overdose. At seven he was hit by a car while playing, badly enough to lose his spleen, and his mother brought him a copy of Gray's Anatomy while he was recovering. The skeletons, organs and labelled body parts that run through his work for the rest of his life come from that book.

In 1978 he and his schoolfriend Al Diaz began writing SAMO across Lower Manhattan - short, cryptic, sardonic statements signed with a tag that started as a joke about same old shit and turned into a citywide presence. By 1980 he had moved from walls to galleries.

How fast did Basquiat's career move?

Absurdly. His first painting sold for two hundred dollars in 1981. At twenty-one he was the youngest artist included in Documenta in Germany; at twenty-two he was in the Whitney Biennial. He met Andy Warhol in October 1982 and the friendship became one of the defining relationships of both their lives, producing a body of collaborative paintings between 1984 and 1985. By the mid-1980s he was earning around 1.4 million dollars a year. His paintings combine text, figure and abstraction with recurring crowns and skulls, and they are consistently about something - jazz musicians, boxers, historical Black figures, and the machinery of a country that produced all of them and then took the credit. He used cocaine and heroin heavily, had tried to get clean in Maui months before, and died at twenty-seven. His 1982 skull painting Untitled sold for 110.5 million dollars in 2017.

Basquiat is dominant Ne, and the paintings look the way they do because of it. A canvas holds a diagram, a crown, a crossed-out word, a chemical symbol, a Black boxer, a fragment of anatomy and a line of copyright text, all at once, and the connections between them are the content. He crossed words out, he said, precisely because that made people look at them. Ne does not present a conclusion; it puts things next to each other until a relation becomes visible.

The auxiliary Fi is why it is not decorative. There is a fixed and entirely serious position underneath the whole body of work about who gets remembered, who gets credited and who gets consumed, and it is why the crowns are on jazz musicians and boxers rather than on kings. He was making an argument about value, from a personal conviction, in a market that was busy demonstrating his point about him.

What did the fame do to him?

The tertiary Te was strong enough to build a career at extraordinary speed and nowhere near strong enough to manage what it produced. He went from two hundred dollars a painting to over a million a year inside four years, as a young Black artist in a downtown scene that alternately celebrated and patronised him, with no structure at all around him. The inferior Si is the part that killed him: no routine, no accumulated caution, no relationship with consequence, and a habit that had been building for years while everyone around him treated it as part of the picture.

ENTP is sometimes suggested because of the wit, the wordplay and the appetite for provocation. The SAMO texts in particular read as Ne-Ti. But the paintings are driven by a moral position rather than by an analytical one - he is not dismantling a system for the interest of it, he is asserting that specific people deserved better than they got, and the assertion never wavers across eight years.

ISFP is occasionally proposed on the strength of the raw expressiveness. But he was relentlessly outward and social: the graffiti, the band, the scene, the Warhol collaboration, the deliberate construction of a public presence. The energy runs into the world rather than away from it.