Basquiat-Warhol Short Essay

Kirillos Samuel

Art 242: Self I As Image

Professor Doris Cacoilo

Short Essay #1





Basquiat-Warhol




In order to understand great art, we must learn a little about the artist who created them. Background information on their lives and experiences throughout life is key to understanding why this art piece looks the way it does and is different than any other workpiece. Many art pieces tell stories behind them and the only one that will be able to get to know this story is the viewer that has done the homework. Otherwise, it becomes a meaningless picture hung up for a quick glance then neglected. Art is a story, it is a collection of thoughts, ideas, and experiences. Two artists whose artwork reflects their bringing up and experiences as youth were Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Andy Warhol was an American artist and producer who pioneered the movement of pop art. He was born on August 6th, 1928 in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. A time period sandwiched between two great world wars, Andy was brought up not in the streets of Beverly Hills but in a more modest beginning, this would be the inspiration for a hardworking career in producing, printmaking, painting, photography, and art. His experiences as a teenager and throughout much of his adult life influenced his artwork to showcase life and mortality and idolization. As stated by Dahlia Elsayed in Painting with Words, Writing with Color, “For artists in general, a lot of things start with the personal”. Some of the most prevalent themes in his artwork were celebrities and pop art which included many bright colors and often mixed some of his favorite things with this love for pop culture. I believe that Andy Warhol through pop art created a colorful persona about his life, something that his youth years were not. As John Berger stated in Ways of Seeing, “Images were first made to conjure up the appearance of something that was absent.” This style of artwork allowed Warhol to be synonymous with this type of art all over New York as his studio became very well-known and housed some of his most well-known art pieces such as Campbell's Soup Can (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962). Andy Warhol continued to create marvelous art pieces and films until his death on February 22nd, 1987 in New York. His style of art and the movements that he was a part of and believed in influenced many artists back then and today and his work will be remembered throughout generations to come.

Jean- Michel Basquiat was also an artist that was molded to unleash his inner artistry through his experiences and adolescence. Basquiat was born in Brooklyn New York on December 22nd, 1960. He was of Puerto Rican and Haitian descent and as a young boy was fascinated by cartoon drawing and music. One circumstance that would later heavily influence his style of art was when young Basquiat was hit by a car and his mother brought him a copy of Greys Anatomy. This started his fascination with human anatomy and became one of his trademarks to include skulls, sinew, and guts in his artwork accompanied by bright colors. “I don’t think about art when I am working, I try to think about life” he once stated. This was the ideology behind much of his work. Some of his well-known artworks that included this fascination of anatomy were showcased in works done in 1983, including Leeches, King Brand and Liberty. During his teenage years, Basquiat took to the streets with his friend Al Diaz to create his first bite at the art world through graffiti art all over lower Manhattan signed with his moniker “SAMO”. Through this stage, he was able to gain popularity and use this to be the groundwork for the rest of his art career. He used cut-up techniques to create his materials when he could not afford art supplies and canvases. He used oil sticks, crayons, spray paint, and pencil to create his art pieces. Basquiat became synonymous with his style of artistry and was influenced by Warhol as they became good friends and shared many of the same techniques in color and abstract. John Berger once said, “If you buy a painting you also buy the look of the thing it represents' ' (Berger, J., 1972). This presented to be true as one of Basquiat’s artworks was auctioned off for over 110 million dollars which proves people were interested in his art theory and his attention to colors and skulls. Andy Warhol and Basquiat shared similar backgrounds and experiences and their artwork showcases these similarities and even though they used different techniques in their artwork they both had similar themes. Moreover, they died one year apart which was a fact I realized while looking at their biographies and thought was interesting as they came from similar backgrounds, shared similar themes and their careers ended in similar times as well.



Work Cited



Berger, J., (1972) Ways of Seeing



Elsayed, D., (2014) Painting with Words, Writing with Color

Jean-Michel Basquiat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Michel_Basquiat

Jordana Moore Saggese (2019) The chaotic brilliance of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat








Jean Michel Basquiat

Jean Michel Basquiat

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol