[.uk] Basquiat (ISBN 185894287X)

Is he really great?:
This is the catalogue for an exhibition held at the Brooklyn museum which benefited from many loans from private collections. The artist's brief career is shown here with many of his best paintings from the pivotal year 1982. The quality of the images is excellent. Now this book has not lifted my doubts whether Basquiat is really a great artist in the line of Twombly and Dubuffet whose influences he acknowledged. Seeing his oeuvre in a retrospective as complete as this one, I can't help but noticing a weakening in the "late years", that is after 1984, when he started inserting xerox collages on his canvases (many of these works appear in the book), or when the repetition of his main themes and characters becomes a bit boring. As for the book itself, if you like Basquiat, it is a must-have. If you don't like him, well...

Good Value:
This is an excellent art book for the price. It contains a large number of color plates of Basquiat's best works, along with some good scholarly essays. The color plates are fairly small, however, with many of the paintings only taking up a half or a third of the page. Full page reproductions would be much more satisfying, but the book is still worth its price. I was pleased that the curators of this exhibition omitted the dreadful Warhol collaborative works, as those are such a down note for Basquiat books to end on. This collection manages to present the very best of his final works, rather than demonstrating, as many works on this subject do, that Basquiat's talent waned and failed.

Extremely Good Book:
I love this book! Full of great colorful plates and information about Basquiat's life.

A retrospective important for any modern art library collection.:
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in 1960 in New York and never reached age 30, but his short and controversial career created a distinct and influential style in modern art and here is celebrated in BASQUIAT, a full-color display of his graffiti-inspired street art. From religious symbolism to inner city influences, BASQUIAT gathers and examines all the works of his eight-year career under one cover in a retrospective important for any modern art library collection.

great book:
shows the progression of his work over the years, a great insight into his evolution as an artist.