Visual Culture : Jean-Michel Basquiat's Rarely Seen Notebooks To Be Exhibited At Brooklyn Museum
Photo Credit: Lizzie Himmel
Jean-Michel Basquiat's grave is located in Brooklyn.
In a report from the New York Times, four French tourists went to Basquiat's gravesite on Thursday at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, to clean the grime from his granite headstone. The volunteers include three university students and a teacher from Paris, St.-Étienne and Alsace, who are all part of an exchange program sponsored by Preservation Volunteers.
"I liked his way of painting with real energy," Fada Mouzaoui, a primary-school teacher in France, said.
The Green-Wood Cemetery is home to more than 400 artists and other acclaimed people, including Frank Morgan, who played the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz; Leonard Bernstein, the conductor, and composer; and Elias Howe, who invented the sewing machine.
READ: Jean-Michel Basquiat's "Untitled" Painting Sells For A Record $110 Million
A few months back, Basquiat's "Untitled" painting sold for a record $110 million. Yusaku Maezawa, a billionaire entrepreneur, purchased the painting after a 10-minute bidding war. Unbelievably, Maesawa paid $57.3 million for Basquiat’s "Untitled, 1982" only last year. Basquiat had first sold his "Untitled" piece for $19,000 in 1984.
An exhibit dedicated to Basquiat's work prior to his fame was also unveiled earlier this year. Titled "Basquiat Before Basquiat: East 12th Street, 1979-1980" the exhibit, which was being shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, was the first to show the work of Basquiat when he and former girlfriend Alexis Adler lived together in a sixth-floor walk-up in the East Village of Manhattan.
Source: nytimes.com
