Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat's art began as words sprayed on walls, years before he ever showed a painting in a gallery. In the late 1970s, as a teenager in Lower Manhattan, he spray-painted cryptic, poetic phrases around the city signed SAMO, short for "same old shit," a project he ran anonymously with a friend, Al Diaz, until word got out who was behind it and Basquiat killed the tag with graffiti reading "SAMO IS DEAD."

He moved from walls to canvas fast. By the early 1980s he was showing in New York galleries, mixing anatomy diagrams, crowns, words crossed out but still legible, and figures drawn from jazz, boxing, and Black history. Andy Warhol, more than 30 years older and already a Pop Art institution, became a close friend and collaborator. Between 1983 and 1985 the two produced roughly 160 joint paintings, Warhol laying down a traced image from an overhead projector and Basquiat painting over and around it, shown together at New York's Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 1985 to reviews that accused Basquiat of being reduced to, in one critic's phrase, Warhol's mascot.

Basquiat died of a heroin overdose in August 1988, at 27. Warhol had died the year before. Basquiat's paintings now regularly sell for tens of millions of dollars, prices nowhere close to reach while he was alive.