Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Making of an Icon

Woodham (Art Collecting), a managing partner at Art Fiduciary Advisors, provides a serviceable account of the short life and explosive posthumous impact of Brooklyn-born artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died at age 27 in 1988. Woodham recounts Basquiat’s troubled childhood, which included the disintegration of his parents’ marriage and his mother’s stints in psychiatric institutions; the early graffiti art that first got him noticed; and his later high-profile relationships with the likes of Andy Warhol and Madonna. Basquiat was an enterprising self-marketer and key figure in the neo-expressionist movement, though during his lifetime his work was undersold compared to that of contemporaries, Woodham writes. After his death from a heroin overdose, however, the second half of the 1990s saw the art world shift its focus to race and identity, skyrocketing the value of his work, which took “great pleasure,” Woodham writes, in depicting Black bodies and interrogated such personal issues as addiction. In 2017, his painting Untitled sold at Sotheby’s for $110.5 million, then the highest price paid at an auction for an American artist’s work. Woodham provides a mostly perfunctory discussion of Basquiat’s style, focusing instead on the complex process by which artistic legacy takes shape and profiling many of the collectors who cemented Basquiat’s reputation. It’s an intriguing window into how the art world anoints its stars. Illus. (Oct.)

Correction: An earlier version of this review misstated the 2017 purchase price of Untitled and which auction house sold it.