Customer Reviews

Basquiat

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I own over 40 Basquiat catalogs and recently attended the current show a LA MOCA. This catalog is merely mediocre. For starters, many of the pictures of the works do not adequately render the colors with the appropriate intensity. As an example, the pink in "Arroz con Pollo" is a shown with a darker, reddish tint to it whereas in the actual painting the pink is very vivid, almost neon bright. Most of the photos are ones that have been previously published in numerous other books and catalogs. The 4 essays from Marc Meyer, Franklin Sirmans, Fred Hoffman, and Kellie Jones are good but not great. Overall, it's a competent catalog. Not bad but certainly not great.

If you can only afford (or have room for) just one Basquiat catalog you're MUCH better off getting the book produced by the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 1999. It features more works, better reproductions and essays Shafrazi, Glenn O'Brien, Peter Brant, Keith Haring, and Henry Geldzahler (to name a few) Yes, it costs more than this catalog but it's well worth it.

I invite all professional photographers to comment on the level of "expertise" of the repros issued in this book. Several of the photos are out of focus--as in JMB's "Undiscovered Genius.." There is never any excuse, no matter how wide or tall the painting (some are 10 or more feet), for any work to be out-of focus. Other paintings have their original color so distorted or leeched that these repros are criminally inept.

This book should be re-called and the photos re-done. It's that bad. The Marshall book, which another reviewer praises, is vastly superior to this book, with the exception of one painting "Notary," which is better repro'd in this book. A few essays and several new works make the book acceptable, barely, for a collector, but even the art-auction catalogues issued by Sotheby's, Christies, Phillips, etc. have superior reproductions of JMB's work. This edition is truly a mockery of a professional art book. I suggest getting the Marshall book, or nearly any of the other books on JMB, esp. those from Germany or France, some of which appear on Ebay as well.

After spending an afternoon strolling the huge exhibition of the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat currently at MOCA in Los Angeles, the visual indulgence becomes repetitive and exhausting. Yes, the works are curated well, the museum spaces the installation artistically, and the access to the spectrum of Basquiat's output (including collaborative works with Andy Warhol and Francesco Clemente) is thorough. But it is a bit of visual overkill to monopolize a museum with works that are so similar that the original graffiti punch that initiated the brief career of this artist is lost.

This highly professional catalogue (monograph) that accompanies the exhibition is a book that should be read BEFORE visiting the museum. The writing is excellent, much attention is paid to the time into which Basquiat emerged, the sociological importance of placing a graffiti artist's works in private galleries and in museums, and indeed the visual manifestation of the Hip Hop movement that Basquiat's works on paper and canvas represent prepares us for a show that subsequently becomes far more important. Quite a change from the usual 'catalogue as souvenir' concept so traditional in museums and galleries. This book stands alone as an art work: the reproductions are generous and well color-keyed, the essays are first rate, and the documentation of the works by Basquiat is in essence a Catalogue raisonné.

So whether or not you have access to this traveling exhibition should not influence whether you add this important book to your library. It simply is that fine! Grady Harp, July 05

The images in this book almost mirror the images shown in the 1st Basquiat retrospective book from the Whitney Museum (edited by Richard Marshall). If you own the Whitney book, there's no need to pick up this one because you'll be looking at a lot of duplicate images. If you don't own a Basquiat book, you can't really go wrong with either edition and I would lean towards the newer book. But there's no need to own both of them. So why the low rating? It's a shame that the curators didn't take the opportunity to add something new for Basquiat fans. Many years have passed since the 1st Whitney retrospective and we're basically presented with a book that repeats what's already been printed. Unfortunately we'll have to wait for someone else to put out a book of new Basquiat material for us to see.

This is the catalogue for an exhibition held at the Brooklyn museum which benefited from many loans from private collections. The artist's brief career is shown here with many of his best paintings from the pivotal year 1982. The quality of the images is excellent. Now this book has not lifted my doubts whether Basquiat is really a great artist in the line of Twombly and Dubuffet whose influences he acknowledged. Seeing his oeuvre in a retrospective as complete as this one, I can't help but noticing a weakening in the "late years", that is after 1984, when he started inserting xerox collages on his canvases (many of these works appear in the book), or when the repetition of his main themes and characters becomes a bit boring. As for the book itself, if you like Basquiat, it is a must-have. If you don't like him, well...

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.

This is an excellent art book for the price. It contains a large number of color plates of Basquiat's best works, along with some good scholarly essays. The color plates are fairly small, however, with many of the paintings only taking up a half or a third of the page. Full page reproductions would be much more satisfying, but the book is still worth its price. I was pleased that the curators of this exhibition omitted the dreadful Warhol collaborative works, as those are such a down note for Basquiat books to end on. This collection manages to present the very best of his final works, rather than demonstrating, as many works on this subject do, that Basquiat's talent waned and failed.

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.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in 1960 in New York and never reached age 30, but his short and controversial career created a distinct and influential style in modern art and here is celebrated in BASQUIAT, a full-color display of his graffiti-inspired street art. From religious symbolism to inner city influences, BASQUIAT gathers and examines all the works of his eight-year career under one cover in a retrospective important for any modern art library collection.

I live in Spain and received the book very fast.
I was very excited about see more pictures about this young artist who died so soon.
The book was in perfect conditions, and I enjoy it a lot.

I bought another book of basquiat from Taschen ed. but is not as good as this one. It has less pictures and less interesting paintings.

I strongly recommend this book. In order to make a small complaint I'd love to have seen more pictures of the paintings made in collaboration with Andy Warhol.

Thank you very much.