After having exhibited Jean-Michel Basquiat’s works on paper in 1997, the Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol is now presenting the painted works of the most famous American artist of the 1980s. The exhibition brings together a major group of paintings that retrace the artist’s pictorial career. The exhibition “Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings, the Story of an Oeuvre” brings together nearly 60 paintings at the Musée Maillol, some of them in monumental formats. These canvases span the ten years during which the artist exercised his talent and were painted in a climate of urgency, as if he had a premonition of the brevity of his destiny, often placing himself on the narrow threshold between life and death. His fleeting lifetime makes him a sort of comet of contemporary art.

Since his sudden death in 1988, Jean-Michel Basquiat has been recognised as one of the major painters of contemporary art. His personality, like the content of his work, seems to have encapsulated the experience of a whole generation who identify with the rebellion conveyed by his paintings. But far from being reduced to an emblem, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work has opened up the field of painting to a new form of intensity, the scope of which is on a par with the eruption of Expressionism at the turn of the century.