Basquiat

This 2010 paperback reprint edition is small! Check the measurements, it's about 7" x 8.5" which is tiny for an art book. I was surprised to see this book in the store because it looked tiny compared the the other art books around it. Not good if you want to look at Basquiat's art.

You are much better off buying the original 2005 hardcover edition of this book with it's larger page size of 9.8" x 11.7" which I own. Amazon also advertises a 2006 paperback version of this book at a slightly smaller 9.4" x 11.4" size which I have not seen in person.

Out of the three versions available, this 2010 is the least attractive and definitely not recommended.

As other reviewers have said, buy the much larger hardcover copy of this book. I bought the paperback (at about 1/3 of the price) but the reproductions of the artwork are a little too small. This book is really about Basquiat's artwork, which is fine. It does include on pp. 26-27 a full copy and a detail of "Philistines," (1982), which in October, 1983:
"Basquiat's painting "The Philistines," (sic) is included in the exhibition "Expressive Painting after Picasso," Fondation (sic) Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland. He is shown alongside artists such as Joan Miro, Jean Dubuffet, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Basquiat's work appears on the cover of the exhibition catalogue."
From "Basquiat: Boom For Real," (2017), Edited by Dieter Buchhart and Eleanor Nairne, with Lotte Johnson, page 274. If you want get the artwork and some background information about Basquiat, his life and times, buy "Basquiat: Boom For Real," which is available at Amazon for $37.42, shipped.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, (BASS-KEY-AH), born 12/22/60, Brooklyn, New York, died 8/12/88 (27), Manhattan, N.Y.
In about 1973, (when he was 13), his mother was committed to a mental institution. Looking at JMB's works, you can see the influence of his mother ("Gray's Anatomy" book she gave him in the hospital after he was hit by a car at age seven), and I believe her difficulties deeply affected him.

The African-American, Hispanic, and also Haitian sources of Basquiat's art can be seen in its color, imagery, and jazz-like energy. Most broadly, however, and formally, his art displays a "semiotic imagination." As Kellie John clarifies in the critical essay "Lost in Translation - Jean-Michel in the [Re]Mix," this is what differentiates Basquiat's art from graffiti; though he has been reflexively lumped into this field of edgy, exotic urban art as an especially inspired graffiti artist. The art critic Okwui Enwezor cited by Kellie also places Basquiat within a broader framework by seeing his art as "an attempt to construct exotic, non-Western aesthetic systems on the margins of modernism."

The three other critical essays heavily illustrated with relevant paintings similarly seek to find motives, aesthetic strategies, and accomplishments accounting for Basquiat's influence and artistic success not only in contemporary art, but for the field and the history of art. Marc Mayer is explicit in this in his essay "Basquiat in History". The two other essays titled "In the Cipher: Basquiat and Hip-Hop Culture" and "The Defining Years: Notes on Five Key Works" respectively relate the artist to a predominant, heterogeneous urban cultural style and closely examine early works for techniques, practices, and interests giving the art an identity and playing out over the artistic career.

Between the heavily-illustrated essays and sections between them with 30 or so paintings each, the number of Basquiat paintings is well over 100. While not definitive because the essays are each in their separate ways so penetrating and revealing and the paintings are not ordered or documented as in a catalog raisonne for example, this edition of this leading modern, urban artist brings Basquiat into focus while offering continually unexpected insights, connections, and biographical and cultural topics.

I can't afford the $100+ for a Basquiat XXL book, so this is an acceptable alternative for the working class fan.

...a good starting point to Basquiat. Diversity of contributing editors kept the comment rangey. Organization of the work reflects his compositionsal approach...

GReat book

I'm very happy I'd read this book and viewed the works in it before I saw a Basquiat exhibit in New York. It provided valuable context.