A facsimile edition of the artist's fascinating working notebooks

Brooklyn-born Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-88) was one of the most important artists of the 1980s. A key figure in the New York art scene, he inventively explored the interplay between words and images throughout his career, first as a member of SAMO, a graffiti group active on the Lower East Side in the late 1970s, and then as a painter acclaimed for his unmistakable Neoexpressionist style. From 1980 to 1987, he filled numerous working notebooks with drawings and handwritten texts. This facsimile edition reproduces the pages of eight of these fascinating and rarely seen notebooks for the first time.

The notebooks are filled with images and words that recur in Basquiat's paintings and other works. Iconic drawings and pictograms of crowns, teepees, and hatch-marked hearts share space with handwritten texts, including notes, observations, and poems that often touch on culture, race, class, and life in New York. Like his other work, the notebooks vividly demonstrate Basquiat’s deep interests in comic, street, and pop art, hip-hop, politics, and the ephemera of urban life. They also provide an intimate look at the working process of one of the most creative forces in contemporary American art.

Published in association with No More Rulers

A few sketches, a single word, a series of images or what could be a one page surreal poem give fascinating glimpses into Basquiat’s thoughts and artistic process in this facsimile edition of eight of his notebooks.

Here are two examples that stood out to me:

VISE OF LOVE
A PILLAR OF SALT
PANIC OF MALFUNCTION

and the second:

SHE LOOKED HER THIRD EYE ACROSS THE
PARTY
AT A SINSAE DIPLOT FROZE UNDER
PALM AT A BEACH RESORT 1000 MILES AWAY—

HER VOICE TURNS INTO A BEGGAR IN SPAIN
A CRUCIFIX TRANSMITTING MONKEY HEAD
HYSTERIA INTO 20,000 TELEVISIONS—

AS THEVES CUT THRU TWO THIN WALLS
TORCHING A HOLE THRU THE THIN METAL
OUTER COVERING

THE TESTTUBE FALLS INTO GREEDY FINGERS
YELLOW FLASH
2 STORY HOUSE BLOWN TO PIECES
WE TOOK PICTURES
IT’S TIME TO..
WALK DOWN ¾ LEFT 3 BLOCKS TO
A RED PICKET FENCE… ( )