Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) - Leonardo da Vinci’s Greatest Hits - Artestar licensed print - COA

Photolithography by Jean-Michel Basquiat (*)
High-quality reproduction of the work “Leonardo da Vinci’s Greatest Hits” (**) a piece created by Basquiat in 1982.
Luxury edition on Monte Carlo high‑grade watercolor paper (300 g/m2).
Print authorized by Artestar New York.
Copyright of the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Includes Certificate of Authenticity (COA).

Specifications:

- Support dimensions: 50 x 45 cm
- Ink blot/chip dimensions: 40 x 35 cm
- Condition: Excellent (this work has never been framed or exhibited, and has always been stored in a professional art folder, therefore offered in perfect condition).

The work will be carefully handled and packed in reinforced cardboard packaging. The shipment will be sent with tracking, operated by the best transport companies.

The shipment will also include full insurance for the final value of the artwork with full reimbursement in case of loss or damage, at no cost to the buyer.

(*) Jean-Michel Basquiat was the eldest of the three children of Matilde Andrades and Gerard Basquiat. His father was a Haitian accountant of respectable financial means and his mother a Puerto Rican graphic designer of great prestige in her profession. Jean-Michel grew up in a torn family environment, his parents divorced, and because of this he had to change schools many times. He studied at a private Catholic school, later at a public school, and finally, at 16, entered City-As-School, a school for talented teenagers from which he was expelled a year before graduating.
Already in his youth he came into contact with the city’s subculture, linked to drug use and street gangs. In 1977, together with Al Díaz, he entered the world of graffiti, painting on subway cars and in the SoHo area, a neighborhood in New York where art galleries proliferate.
The following year he left school a year before graduating from high school and left home to live for two years on the streets, in abandoned buildings or with friends in Lower Manhattan, surviving by selling postcards and T-shirts that he himself decorated. He continued to devote himself to graffiti; his paintings and writings carried a lot of poetic and philosophical charge, but above all satirical. His alter ego’s pseudonym shared with Al Díaz was SAMO (short for “Same Old Shit,” i.e., “the same old crap,” with which they both signed their tags and graffiti with cryptic messages. The use of this name was decisive in his life.
These murals bore inscriptions like “SAMO saves idiots” or “SAMO ends brainwashing by religion, politics of nothingness, and false philosophy.” An article about SAMO’s street writing published in The Village Voice was the first sign that the art world was taking an interest in him.
The artist had several relationships that influenced his work; one of the most significant was with artist Andy Warhol.
Additionally, romantically, he was involved with several women; one of the most well-known today was Madonna. Lower Manhattan was the area where they lived at that time; in 1982 they began spending more time together and going to parties in galleries. One thing that united them, she says in an interview: “I was a big fan of Miles Davis and Charlie Parker.”
In 1988 there were exhibitions in Paris and New York, and in April of that same year he tried to overcome his addictions and retreated to his home in Hawaii. He returned to New York in June, announcing that he had freed himself from his addictions, but on August 12, 1988, at the age of 27, he died of a heroin overdose, becoming the most successful visual artist in the history of Afro-descendant art. He is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

Throughout his short but intense artistic career he would hold more than 40 solo exhibitions and participate in around 100 group shows. Self-promotion and advertising clout were priorities for Basquiat, as they had been for Andy Warhol or Julian Schnabel before him.
Neo-expressionism gradually displaced appropriationism, partly thanks to the economic strength that raised art prices, especially painting, to high levels, and partly due to the support of galleries and collectors. Critics, however, were not unanimously approving of his work, and it was common to decry the lack of theoretical basis in neo-expressionist discourse. It was claimed that the neo-expressionists’ art lacked any political or social meaning, was merely merchandise, and therefore subject to market fluctuations. Neo-expressionist painting was reduced to a consumer product and, as such, a creatively disqualified and vulgar act.

(**) No theme is more powerful or coveted in Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work (1960–1988) than the singular skull. For this enigmatic artist, the human head was more than an obsession. As suggested by the title “In This Case” (1983), the head is a box or cage containing a toothed gear filled with impulses and ideas.
This work stands among Basquiat’s greatest achievements: a cranial abyss into which the artist has poured the contents of his visual imagination, merging centuries of stylistic influence.
“In This Case” is one of the three monumental skulls Basquiat painted. The painting’s intense pictoriality and immediacy are unmatched in Basquiat’s oeuvre.