(CelebNMusic247-News) The Monuments Men Honors Jean-Michel Basquiat
In advance of the release of THE MONUMENTS MEN, we are honoring legendary African-American artists of the 20th Century.
The Monuments Men which stars George CLooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray and more is about an unlikely World War II platoon are tasked to rescue art masterpieces from Nazi thieves and return them to their owners. If Basquiat was around in that time, these would have been the men to save his works.
We honor Basquiat and his incrediable vision of mind body and passion translated to canvas.
Jean-Michel Basquiat:
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn, New York. (December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988) He was a Haitian-American artist. Basquiat first achieved notoriety as part of SAMO, an informal graffiti group who wrote enigmatic epigrams in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City during the late 1970s where the hip hop, post-punk and street art movements had coalesced. By the 1980s he was exhibiting his Neo-expressionist and Primitivist paintings in galleries and museums internationally, but he died of a heroin overdose at the age of 27 in 1988. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his art in 1992.
Basquiat’s art focused on “suggestive dichotomies,” such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. He appropriated poetry, drawing and painting, and married text and image, abstraction and figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique.
Basquiat used social commentary in his paintings as a “springboard to deeper truths about the individual”, as well as attacks on power structures and systems of racism, while his poetics were acutely political and direct in their criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle.
In other news, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Reclining Nude, by Paige Powell is on view at The Suzanne Geiss Company, New York and runs until February 22.
These intimate moments have been in storage for over twenty years. The process of sorting through boxes of prints, slides, negatives, and contact sheets has begun, and is currently being catalogued with the help of Pink Martini musician Thomas Lauderdale. For Powell, Basquiat was only the starting point. The overwhelming quantity of photographs and media chronicle important transformative moments of art and culture in America, bringing promise of future exhibits that will reanimate the New York art scene of the 1980’s.
