BASQUIAT, PAINTER OF RHYTHM - ILLUSTRATIONS, COLOR

Jean-Michel Basquiat, born in 1960 in Brooklyn, died of an overdose in 1988 in Manhattan, the city he has just conquered. He is undoubtedly the painter most "musical" in the history of art. It is difficult indeed to see one of his works without immediately grasping the tempo. He draws it from hip hop – born almost at the same time as him in the black and Caribbean ghettos of the South Bronx – but also in jazz, which his father surrounded him with throughout his childhood. painting of signs, words, shapes, materials and colors, is only rhythm, boiling and hurried, spontaneous and coded, a rhythm that makes its works to the point that seeing them is also – and above all? – “hearing” them. In several of his paintings, Basquiat pays homage to his "heroes": Miles Davis, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and, above all, Charlie Parker. An amateur musician (guitar and percussion), he created a group at the age of seventeen noise music, experimental and provocative, has a passionate affair with Madonna (then unknown, but as ambitious as he was), before illustrating two Record covers – rap and punk-ska. The exhibition of the Philharmonic Paris was designed in collaboration with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.