
2026
Jean-Michel Basquiat
2026
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Burn bright enough and you’ll be remembered forever, no matter how tragically short your life is cut. Such was the fate of game-changing artist Jean-Michel Basquiat – friend of Madonna, Grace Jones, Debbie Harry, Keith Haring and Andy Warhol – who blazed an indelible trail before joining the infamous 27 Club. But when legend envelops your legacy, with Basquiat’s brilliantly bold works going for as much as US$110 million, the truth can get lost. Viridiana Lieberman and Quinn Whitney Wilson’s iridescent documentary sets the record straight.
Unlike Vincent van Gogh, the incomparable artist and iconoclast Jean-Michel Basquiat lived just long enough to reap the benefits of his street art-born, gallery-bound creative practice, which ignited an eternal flame during the more-is-more era of ’80s Manhattan. Hanging with the likes of Keith Haring and Andy Warhol, alongside pop royalty including Grace Jones, Debbie Harry and Madonna, Basquiat made a fortune. But his ongoing battle with heroin addiction would cut short his astonishingly accomplished life at only 27 years. With a loss this cruel, mythologising takes hold, blurring fact and fictions both external and self-spun. The editor of Oscar-nominated Perfect Neighbor (2025) Viridiana Lieberman and co-director Quinn Whitney Wilson’s equal parts energising and elegiac documentary cuts through the noise to reveal who Basquiat truly was. With unrivalled access to the family archives and deeply personal insights from the late artist’s sisters Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, Jean-Michel Basquiat is priceless.
