Jean-Michel Basquiat

Real Dollars & Gold Leaves

Tel Aviv, July 2021

Acrylic on Canvas [100cm x 100cm]

The character is painted on real Dollars with gold leaves.

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Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 – 1988) was an American artist. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement.

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Basquiat became famous in the early 1980s, when the idea that artists were supposed to be commercial innocents fell apart for good, and when the idea of the “art star”— a funnily abbreviated inversion, if you think about it, of starving artist—first came into vogue. In 1985, The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story on Basquiat, titled “New Art, New Money.” Its tone was both awed and suspicious, with constant references to a hot, possibly gullible, market in contemporary art. His work was said to be selling “at a brisk pace—so brisk, some observers joked, that the paint was barely dry,” and Basquiat himself was quoted as worrying he had become a “gallery mascot.” Whatever else was true, as the art historian Jordana Moore Saggese has said since, “this was not the starving artist the public was accustomed to seeing.”