num_pages: 400
description: The bestselling biography of the controversial artist, and a vivid account of the fast times in which he lived--and diedPainter Jean-Michel Basquiat was the Jimi Hendrix of the art world: in less than a decade he went from being a teenage graffiti writer to an international art star; he was dead of a drug overdose at age twenty-seven. Basquiat's brief career spanned the giddy '80s art boom and epitomized its outrageous excess, from its art dealers to its drug dealers, from its clubs to its galleries. A legend in his own lifetime, Basquiat became a fixture in the downtown scene and got involved with many of the period's most celebrated personalities, including Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, and Madonna.Phoebe Hoban's Basquiat , the first biography of this charismatic figure, charts the trajectory from the artist's troubled childhood to his volatile passage through the art world of white dealers and nouveau-riche collectors. As much the portrait of an era as the portrait of an artist, Basquiat is an incisive expose of the eighties art market that paints a vivid picture of the rise and fall of the graffiti movement, the East Village art scene, the avaricious dealers, and the out-of-control auction houses. Ten years after the artist's death, Basquiat resurrects both the painter and his time.* A New York Times Notable Book* Basquiat appeared on the Los Angeles Times and Voice Literary Supplement bestseller lists"Compulsively readable. . . there is enormous value in it, especially in Hoban's depiction of the glitzy 1980s art world, which is sharply etched and deadly accurate." --Patricia Bosworth, The New York Times Book Review
language: English
title: Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art
titlecomplete: Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art
characters: Jean-Michel Basquiat
genres: Womens, Race, Academic, Art History, Nonfiction, History, Biography Memoir, African American, Art, Biography
ratings_count: 1012
publisher: Penguin Books