Brooklyn Museum Opens Major Retrospective of Basquiat's Early Work

NEW YORK — The Brooklyn Museum opened a major retrospective of Jean-Michel Basquiat's early work on Friday, gathering 87 paintings, drawings, and mixed-media works from the period between 1978 and 1984 — the years that took the Brooklyn-born artist from anonymous street tags in Lower Manhattan to global recognition. The exhibition, titled Before the Crown, includes several works that have not been exhibited publicly in New York in more than 25 years, lent for the occasion by private collectors and international museums including the Broad in Los Angeles, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.

The show opens on the 40th anniversary of Basquiat's first major New York gallery survey and arrives at a moment of renewed scholarly and popular attention to his work. A feature film about his life is in production, a comprehensive catalogue raisonné of his work was completed last year by a team of art historians, and several high-profile auction sales have pushed individual works past the $100 million threshold in recent years. The Brooklyn Museum's decision to focus specifically on the early, pre-fame period is a curatorial choice intended to direct attention back to the formative work rather than the mythology.

The exhibition's opening section is devoted to the SAMO era — the graffiti tag Basquiat and collaborator Al Diaz applied to walls across SoHo, Tribeca, and the East Village in the late 1970s, accompanied by cryptic and politically charged text. Documentary photographs, notebooks, and a partial recreation of several tagged surfaces drawn from archival records and oral histories establish the street context from which Basquiat's studio practice emerged. Curators have been careful not to frame the early work as mere prelude, arguing that the wit, compression, and political consciousness of the SAMO tags are already fully formed artistic strategies, not rough drafts.

The central galleries present the explosive production of 1981 to 1983, when Basquiat moved from cheap postcards and door panels to large-scale canvases that combined figure, text, symbol, and found material in dense, layered compositions. Works from this period draw on anatomy, urban geography, African American history, and the vernacular iconography of street life, sports, and mass media in ways that were immediately legible to some audiences and deliberately obscure to others. The show's wall text is restrained, resisting the temptation to over-explain works that were designed to resist easy interpretation.

Among the highlights of the exhibition is a group of works created during Basquiat's residency in Los Angeles in 1982, several of which have rarely been seen outside California and one of which — a large canvas combining a skeleton figure with text passages drawn from medical diagrams and boxing records — is considered by some scholars to be among his finest works of the period. Also on view is an early collaboration with Andy Warhol, predating the more famous collaborative series of 1984 to 1985, that has been displayed only twice since its creation.

Brooklyn Museum director Eleanor Park said in remarks at the preview opening that the choice to mount the retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum rather than at a Manhattan institution was deliberate. "Basquiat is a Brooklyn story," she said. "He grew up in Boerum Hill, he walked these streets. There's something right about this work coming home." The museum has partnered with several Brooklyn schools and community organizations to ensure that young people in the borough have access to the exhibition through subsidized school visits and free community admission evenings on the first Friday of each month.

Before the Crown runs through October 12. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by the museum and co-written by four art historians, including two scholars who are the first Black women to contribute to a major Basquiat catalogue. A series of public programs, including a symposium in July and a series of conversations with artists influenced by Basquiat's work, will run alongside the exhibition through the summer.