In his essay, Royalty, Heroism, and the Streets: The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Farris Thompson recounts the story of the first time he was able to watch Basquiat at work. It was in February 1985. Just before Basquiat began painting, he did something rather interesting, as Farris Thompson notes…

"Basquiat activated an LP of free, Afro-Cuban, and other kinds of jazz. Then he resumed work on an unfinished collage. Hard bop sounded. Jean-Michel pasted on letters and crocodiles. He did this with a riffing insistence, matching the music. Digits in shifting sequences, 2 2 2 2, 4 4 4, 5 5 5 5, further musicalized the canvas…He continued to work. Four styles of jazz – free, mambo-inflected, hard bop, and, at the end, fabulous early bop with sudden stops – accompanied the making of that collage."

Towards the end of the 1970s, Jean-Michel Basquiat whose nom de plume at that time was SAMO was producing graffiti on street walls around Brooklyn, New York. It was a slightly......

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Title: Basquiat
Approximate Word Count: 3253
Approximate Pages: 14 (250 words per double-spaced page)

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