Basquiat

Painter Jean-Michel Basquiat was the Jimi Hendrix of the art world: in less than a decade he went from being a teenage graffiti artist 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-a legend in his own lifetime, he was a fixture of the downtown scene, a wild hexus of music, fashion, art, and drugs. Along the way, Basquiat got involved with many of the period's most celebrated personalities, from his friendships with Keith Haring and Andy Warhol to his brief romantic fling with Madonna. Phoebe Hoban's Basquiat, the first biography of this charismatic figure, chronicles the meteoric success and overnight burnout that made Basquiat 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 '80s 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. Basquiat resurrects both the painter and his time. Book jacket.Hoban, Phoebe is the author of 'Basquiat', published 2004 under ISBN 9780143035121 and ISBN 0143035126.