Accompanying a major touring exhibition, this first survey of Basquiat's rarely seen notebooks presents the artist's handwritten notes, poems and drawings, along with related works on paper and large-scale paintings. Without formal training, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) managed to develop a new and expressive style that made him one of the most influential artists in the postmodern revival of the figure during the 1980s. In a series of notebooks from the early to mid-1980s, never before exhibited, Basquiat combined text and images reflecting his link to the countercultures of graffiti and hip-hop in New York City, as well as pop culture and world events. Filled with handwritten texts, poems, pictograms, and drawings, many of them iconic images that recur throughout his work-tipis, crowns, skeleton-like silhouettes, and grimacing masks-these notebooks reveal much about the artist's creative process and the importance of the written word in his aesthetic. With over 150 pages of notebooks and numerous drawings and paintings, this important book sheds new light on Basquiat's career and his critical place in contemporary art history.

Publisher: Rizzolli