Below is an excerpt from my recently published book, The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. I've made the full text available so that students of art history and admirers of his work alike may continue to advance the study of Basquiat's work. 

When I first met Jean-Michel Basquiat, he was living and working in the ground floor gallery-living space of Larry Gagosian’s recently completed ultra modern, multi- story home on Market Street in Venice, California. Early in his residency, Basquiat was joined for a week or so by Madonna. They had been seeing each other in New York City, and she came to Venice to hang out with Jean-Michel. They were looking for fun, and it was decided that they should go for lunch at the commissary on the lot of the Twentieth Century Fox studio. Through someone in Hollywood (which might have been Doug Cramer, Barry Lowen, or Scott Spiegel, all of whom had taken a very early interest in Basquiat’s work), a reservation was booked and the three of us drove over to the movie studio on the edge of Beverly Hills. The commissary was a large, open, high- ceilinged room with an expanse of tables. We were shown to a table from which Basquiat and Madonna surveyed the diners, many of them well-recognized celebrities. They kept to themselves, exchanging intimate words and expressions. What they did share with me I have never forgotten. They assured me that someday they would be famous, and that everyone in this commissary would know who these two aspiring young artists were. Over the years I have often returned to my memories of that afternoon. Of course, they were correct. Today Jean-Michel Basquiat and Madonna are as renowned as any star Hollywood has produced.

One of the gifts of my life was the opportunity to know and work with Jean-Michel Basquiat. During the artist’s residency in Venice, California beginning in November 1982 and continuing with infrequent interruptions until May 1984, Jean-Michel and I produced seven silkscreen editions as well as a series of approximately 30 original paintings. During his Venice residency I also arranged with Mark Francis for Basquiat’s rst museum exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in June 1984. I also facilitated the rst acquisition of an important work of art by Jean-Michel Basquiat by an American museum, when I donated Untitled (1983) (57 x 75 inches, silkscreen on canvas) to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As of this writing, this is still the only large-scale work by Jean-Michel Basquiat in the museum’s collection. In 2005 I co-curated the most recent American retrospective, “Basquiat” at the Brooklyn Museum, which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts.

Continue reading the full text of The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat.