num_pages: 393
description: Painter 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. 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 white art world of dealers and nouveau-riche collectors, chronicling the meteoric success and overnight burnout that made him an instant art-world myth. 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, and the out-of-control auction houses. Ten years after the artist's death, Basquiat resurrects both the painter and his time.
language: English
title: Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art
titlecomplete: Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art
characters: Jean-Michel Basquiat
genres: History, Race, African American, Biography Memoir, Biography, Art History, Nonfiction, Academic, Art, Womens
ratings_count: 1012
publisher: Penguin Books