![]() This mysterious aspect of his work helps to keep his legend alive and drive art collectors to pay multi millions in order to purchase some of his most celebrated original works. Attempts to interpret the meaning of his paintings will likely go on indefinitely due to the abstract nature of many of them. This in-depth review of the person being examined often comes after their death, and their status can grow significantly as more is understood about them.īasquiat’s work is still in a state of great debate to this day. The art world and pop culture as a whole, has a way of getting to the core of the exceptional artist and learning more about what made them who they are. Like many great artist through history, his greatness and appeal grew significantly after his death. Basquiat managed to create a lasting art legacy through his creations, before his untimely demise from a heroin overdose in 1988, at the age of 27. ![]() The turbulent life and times of the renowned artist have been well-documented through books, television, and films. The two themes - crowns and heads - proclaim a deep struggle between dichotomies: perceived self-worth and marginalization, divinity and destitution, and the interplay between the material world and the intellect. Nick Curtis describes the crown as a proxy artist’s signature, and this ties in perfectly with its interpretation as a signal of Basquiat’s determination and ambition to rise up from obscurity.īasquiat’s crown acts as a perfect complement to his fascination with the human head and skull. So a simpler, three-pointed crown could better function as a logo, to proliferate beyond the artworks themselves to the wider culture, and stamp the artist’s legacy in the minds of mass audiences. The younger Basquiat and his friends had plastered New York’s SoHo neighborhood with this acronym for “same old shit,” as a commentary on the exclusivity of the art world, but also perhaps to build notoriety in preparation for his entry into that world. A common theory is that the three-point crown signifies the letter W to stand for Warhol, whom Basquiat befriended and greatly admired.īut we know from his interview with Anthony Haden-Guest in True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World that Basquiat was very interested in the power of logos, explaining his SAMO© graffiti tag as such. It’s interesting that the crowns in this earlier work have more points, whereas in paintings that follow it took on a simpler three-pointed shape. Red Kings, 1981Ībrahams interprets the figure on the left side of the Red Kings painting as Basquiat himself, and suggests the skull figure on the right as representing Pablo Picasso. On his fascinating website, Every Painter Paints Himself, art historian Simon Abrahams explores the first two of these interpretations, suggesting that Basquiat was carrying on an established convention of artists throughout history painting their own likenesses into their portraits of kings.
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