Princeton University Press The 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 nots with drawings and handwritten texts.This facsimile edition reproduces the pages of eight of these fascinating and rarely seen nots for the first time.The nots 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 nots 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.