Basquiat, Edited by Marc Mayer, with Essays by Fred Hoffman Et Al

Basquiat, edited by Marc Mayer, with essays by Fred Hoffman et al. Merrell and Brooklyn Museum, 2010, first trade paperback edition (hardcover published 2005). 224 pages. $29.95 trade paper ISBN 978-1-8589-4519-4 color illustrations, exhibition history, bibliography, index.

The African-American, Hispanic, and also Haitian sources of Jean-Michel Basquiat's art can be seen in its color, imagery, and jazz-like energy. Most broadly, however, and formally, his art displays a "semiotic imagination." As Kellie John clarifies in the critical essay "Lost in Translation - Jean-Michel in the [Re]Mix," this is what differentiates Basquiat's art from graffiti; though he has been reflexively lumped into this field of edgy, exotic urban art as an especially inspired graffiti artist. The art critic Okwui Enwezor cited by Kellie also places Basquiat within a broader framework by seeing his art as "an attempt to construct exotic, non-Western aesthetic systems on the margins of modernism."

The three other critical essays heavily illustrated with relevant paintings similarly seek to find motives, aesthetic strategies, and accomplishments accounting for Basquiat's influence and artistic success not only in contemporary art, but for the field and the history of art. Marc Mayer is explicit in this in his essay "Basquiat in History". The two other essays titled "In the Cipher: Basquiat and Hip-Hop Culture" and "The Defining Years: Notes on Five Key Works" respectively relate the artist to a predominant, heterogeneous urban cultural style and closely examine early works for techniques, practices, and interests giving the art an identity and playing out over the artistic career.

Between the heavily-illustrated essays and sections between them with 30 or so paintings each, the number of Basquiat paintings is well over 100. While not definitive because the essays are each in their separate ways so penetrating and revealing and the paintings are not ordered or documented as in a catalog raisonne for example, this edition of this leading modern, urban artist brings Basquiat into focus while offering continually unexpected insights, connections, and biographical and cultural topics.