I was so excited several months ago when I heard there would be a big exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum all about Jean-Michel Basquiat’s notebooks. I’d seen some of the images of the notebooks and pages and thought it sounded really cool, but then I read that the notebooks had been carefully disassembled so the individual pages could be displayed in the exhibition. Although the curators supposedly did this very carefully and claimed that the notebooks could be stitched back together into their original form, I kind of lost interest in going to the exhibition. The idea of all those lonely pages made me sad.
BUT! My interest was recently rekindled when I discovered that I could experience Basquiat’s notebooks in a something closer to their original form through this book:
This is not the official exhibition catalog, but it’s a sort of compilation facsimile of Basquiat’s notebooks. The format is just like an actual composition book, with some of the most interesting pages from his various notebooks reproduced inside. It’s published by Princeton Architectural Press.
From the publisher’s website:
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.Review:
“This carefully reproduced facsimile edition of renowned visual artist Basquiat’s eight notebooks provides us a glimpse into the mind of a visionary artist. On nearly every page, readers will ponder over why and how Basquiat chose to string together these specific word marks and often bizarre phrases. The notebooks function as a sort of incubator for Basquiat’s artistic process as well as a finished product in their own right . . . a vital part of Basquiat’s legacy and an invaluable window into his ingenious and whimsical mind.”—Publishers Weekly
