Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child is a documentary film about Jean-Michel Basquiat published in 2010, which is on the basis of a footage taken by director Tamra Davis who delves into Basquiat as an iconoclast when she met Basquiat in 1985. She has paid great tribute to her friend Basquiat in this documentary including interviews with people close to Basquiat.

Focused on a rare interview of Basquiat shot by Davis about twenty years ago, it has recorded the dramatic ups and downs of a rebellious artist. New York City in its 1970s is a place where crimes are spanning here and there, Basquiat draws on the wall with the his symbol ‘SAMO’ all over New York, and it is in 1981 that he starts to paint on canvas. In 1983, he is renowned for his label “rock star status”. Racism from his peers are an inevitable difficulties he has to overcome, however, he till embarks on the way to achieves critical and commercial success. In 1985, he cooperates with Andy Warhol, a celebrity artist at that time, in painting. Being seriously addicted to heroin, Basquiat, at the age of 27, dies of an overdose in 1988.

The artist Jean-Michel Basquiat as an original and prolific artist has climbed on the summit of his career when he was only 25 years old, and his paintings today are worth a million dollars or more. People who are interested in his arts have been trying to understand for many years. Though the film presented us the primary witnesses to his sufferings, tribulations and triumphs of Basquiat, it lacks of the traces of his family members, childhood friends, non-famous acquaintances for a more in-depth understanding of the man Basquiat. Being a famous artist, so many talked about him as a black artist, as a minority and as a young man, but being the child of an immigrant family in the U.S. is an important factor that has constituted Basquiat’s character.

Basquiat stunned the art world after seemingly popping out of nowhere in the late 1970s. Actually, the art world had failed to accept and embrace Basquiat a creative place should be. With the ability to simplify his subject matter to its simplest form, and he often incorporate the images into distorted text that appropriately presents the spiritual situation of the society of his times. We have to say it’s the authenticity of his work, its inner depth of his spirit, unique photographic lines, and vitality in color that makes him a great artist in the history of modern arts.

To some extent, maybe it’s partly because his vibrant art—impacted by expressionism, pop art, and street fashion—broke radically with the shaped tradition of art, partly because of its compelling, dramatic appearance, and partly because he was black. No matter what makes him great, he once struggled for expression and freedom of thoughts through his brush in a complicated world by remaining his trueness of a child. youressay代修网课

Basquiat’s art still remains an enigma in people’s mind. He may have painted with the simplicity of the child, caricatures in an eccentric manner, tries to shock us in an exaggerating manner, but he will continue to impact us forever.