The Notebooks

by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Larry Warsh (Editor)

Overview

A facsimile edition of the artist's fascinating working notebooks

Brooklyn-born Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) was one of the most important artists of the 1980s. A key figure in the New York art scene, he inventively explored the interplay between words and images throughout his career, first as a member of SAMO, a graffiti group active on the Lower East Side in the late 1970s, and then as a painter acclaimed for his unmistakable Neoexpressionist style. From 1980 to 1987, he filled numerous working notebooks with drawings and handwritten texts. This facsimile edition reproduces the pages of eight of these fascinating and rarely seen notebooks for the first time.

The notebooks are filled with images and words that recur in Basquiat's paintings and other works. Iconic drawings and pictograms of crowns, teepees, and hatch-marked hearts share space with handwritten texts, including notes, observations, and poems that often touch on culture, race, class, and life in New York. Like his other work, the notebooks vividly demonstrate Basquiat’s deep interests in comic, street, and pop art, hip-hop, politics, and the ephemera of urban life. They also provide an intimate look at the working process of one of the most creative forces in contemporary American art.

Published in association with No More Rulers

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691167893
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	05/26/2015
Series:	The Sketchbooks , #1
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	111,934
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 9.70(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) was an American artist. He has been the subject of retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Serpentine Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Foundation Beyeler, among others, and his work is in the permanent collections of major museums around the world. Larry Warsh is an art collector and the editor of Weiwei-isms (Princeton). He is on the board of the nonprofit organization Muse Film and Television, and was a member of the Basquiat Authentication Committee from its establishment in 1984 to its dissolution in 2012.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Jean-Michel Basquiat's journals are, by turns, cryptic, revelatory, beautiful, and unsettling. They provide a rare point of entry into the life and imagination of one of the twentieth century's most gifted and enigmatic artists."—Adam Bradley, University of Colorado, Boulder, and author of Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop

Editorial Reviews

05/11/2015
This carefully reproduced facsimile edition of renowned visual artist Basquiat’s eight notebooks provides us a glimpse into the mind of a visionary artist. On nearly every page, readers will ponder over why and how Basquiat chose to string together these specific word marks and often bizarre phrases. The notebooks function as a sort of incubator for Basquiat’s artistic process as well as a finished product in their own right. The artist’s focus on enigmatic aphorisms and poems calls to mind his career as a graffiti artist in New York. Some of Basquiat’s famous visual motifs, such as the crown, do show up in his notebooks. Editor Warsh, who acquired the notebooks in the late 1980s, provides clear context for the significance of the notebooks in his short introduction. Basquiat used them to grapple with the world around him. From street signs to advertisements, he took in the visual cues of the city and filters them back through his pen. Some pages of the notebooks are filled with verses while others contain a single word or phrase. Other pages seem not so much written as designed. These intriguing notebooks are a vital part of Basquiat’s legacy and an invaluable window into his ingenious and whimsical mind. (June)

Publishers Weekly

One of Art World’s Top Ten Art Books to Read during Thanksgiving, 2015

From the Publisher