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Jean-Michel Basquiat

Art

20 Amazing Artist-Inspired Tattoos

By Caroline Stanley on

[Editor's note: While your Flavorwire editors take a much-needed holiday break, we're revisiting some of our most popular features of the year. This post was originally published February 16, 2011.] If we’re being honest, most of us will never own a work of art by a famous artist. And while back in college, it might have been okay to pay homage to one of the greats with a poster print from the museum, these days when it comes to the artwork that hangs on our walls, we tend to opt for original pieces by emerging (read: more affordable) talents. A few enterprising souls have found a way to sidestep the issue completely by displaying famous works of art directly on their bodies. Click through for some of our favorite examples, and if you happen to have an art-inspired tattoo, be sure to tell us about it in the comments. … Read More

Art

Happy Birthday Basquiat: 10 Memorable Movies About Artists

By Marina Galperina on

There’s something about artists that makes them compelling biopic subjects, especially if there’s something sexy, traumatic, Bohemian and otherwise scandalous about their personal life. In honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s birthday — he would have been 51 today — we present a few recommendations, just to get you started. Here you will find those dramatic details artfully exploited on celluloid with various degrees of salaciousness and, we hope, some valuable background on Bacon’s, Van Gogh’s, and Kahlo’s actual artistic careers. First up? The birthday boy himself. … Read More

Art

10 Epic Artist x Musician Collaborations

By Marina Galperina on

When established artists decided to lend their talent to the music world, the creations that result from the collision of egos and imaginations are often mind blowing. From Pablo Picasso’s costumes for an avant garde ballet by Erik Satie to Andy Warhol’s management of the Velvet Underground, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite artist and musician collaborations. How did Salvador Dalí and Alice Cooper meet? How did the world survive? Read on to find out and drop us a comment if you think we missed any biggies. … Read More

Art

Vintage Shots of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s SAMO© Graffiti

By Marina Galperina on

At the end of the ’70s, as New York City’s Soho transformed from an ethnic factory district to the art hub of the elite, the graffiti collective SAMO© — made up of an anonymous teenage Jean-Michel Basquiat, his high school friend/graff veteran Al Diaz, and artist Shannon Dawson — began its contrarian poeticisms. Basquiat was the driving force. SAMO© was “the drug,” the abstract, sarcastic, witty, site-specific prose poetry exhibit via vandalism, a “spiritual salvation” from the “so-called avant-garde had become a formidable, lucrative, orthodox institution,” as photographer Henry Flynt explains in his thorough essay. Documenting the tags in 1979, Flynt could not predict Basquiat’s eventual fame, yet, he understood the right way to photograph “the experience” of reading SAMO© — not just capturing the truncated text element, but its urban placement in full color. Spotted by The World’s Best Ever, check out these authenticated vintage shots in our gallery. … Read More

Art

Art on Film: A Look at Iconic Artworks in Movies

By Marina Galperina on

These are not just pictures on a wall. These are not some set pieces in the corner. There are certain artworks in film that are as vital as its characters. Of course, it helps when a character happens to bludgeon someone to death with a certain rude-shaped sculpture or a painting casts an evil spell of eternal youth on a heartless protagonist. Whether it’s famous artists creating work for fictional ones or directors commissioning well-crafted fakes to take the place of what they can’t acquire, most of these memorable artworks come with a little background story. Here are ten (mostly) great films and the tales of origin behind their most central art pieces. … Read More

Art

Art-Loving Picasso Thief 'Putting on His Own Show' of Stolen Work

By Judy Berman on

Remember the art thief who pocketed a Picasso drawing and escaped via taxi? Well, it turns out there’s more to one-time sommelier Mark Lugo’s story. The Bay Citizen reports that he collected 11 works, worth half a million dollars, stolen from New York hotels and galleries and was enjoying them privately… Read More

Photography

Anton Perich's Photos of Cultural Icons Partying in '70s New York

By Marina Galperina on

Young-faced John Waters, precociously festive Brooke Shields, wild-eyed Salvador Dali and Tennessee Williams guffawing at Studio 54 — Croatian-born artist/filmmaker/photographer Anton Perich captured some of 20th century’s most talked about icons at their most hardiest of party moments, first as a busboy at the legendary Max’s Kansas City, then as a contributing photographer to Warhol’s Interview magazine. Recruiting some of Andy’s Superstars for his own films, Perich was the Grace Jones haircut to Nico’s Chelsea Girls bang trim. Perich also pioneered digital art with the invention of a pre-inkjet printer electric panting machine, but for those still happily bogged down by the mythology of those bygone years, never mind. Let’s souse in these celebrity snippets of mostly ’70s, partially NSFW party life. … Read More

Art

Fear of Flying: The Top 10 Artworks of Airplanes

By Paul Laster on

Memorial Day weekend kicks off the summer travel season, and while some of us may prefer to travel by car, others are currently printing out boarding passes and heading to the airport for a exciting journey to an exotic place. Since summer invites the discovery of cultural capitals and exploration of distant sites, we’ve assembled a lively mix of art about airplanes — ranging from Andy Warhol’s painting of a newspaper headline of a plane crash in France and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s expressionistic canvas of a plane flying over a city skyline to Hiraki Sawa’s video still of miniature jets flying around his apartment and Tom Sachs’ DIY reconstruction of a complete airplane lavatory — to help you overcome any possible fears of flying and to get you planning where the next walk through airport security will take you. Enjoy! … Read More

Art

MetroCard Mosaics of John Lennon, Michael Jackson, and More

By Judy Berman on

We’ve seen quite a bit of recycled MetroCard art recently, from the Metrobench to an entire show of cards transformed into tiny paintings. But we are especially fond of Guatemalan-born, New York-based artist Juan Carlos Pinto’s beautifully detailed MetroCard mosaics, which include portraits of cultural icons including Michael Jackson, John Lennon, Frida Kahlo, Nelson Mandela, and many more. And, although subway-card art is certainly trendy, there is a purpose behind Pinto’s use of the medium: repurposing materials that would otherwise be garbage supports his commitment to environmentalism. Check out a gallery of Pinto’s celebrity images after the jump, and visit his website to see more of the artist’s work. If you’re in New York, you can see Pinto’s work in person tomorrow night, April 28. … Read More

Art

Famous Artists’ Last Works

By Marina Galperina on

From a strange, sexy, mechanical shrine that occupied Marcel Duchamp for the last two decades of his life to Vincent van Gogh’s and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s disputed paintings — final works of famous artists are always something of a curiosity. What were their near-death obsessions? What was that artist’s last artistic hurrah? From a loving tribute to Stalin to the act of dying itself, find the controversial, surprising and affirming end chapter pieces from art history’s heroes in our gallery. … Read More