Basquiat's first European retrospective, at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris.

Basquiat's first European retrospective, at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris. - By Jackie Wullschlager - Slate Magazine
From hip-hop to hype, African-American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat embodied everything noisy, audacious, disaffected, exhilarating and cynical about the revival of figurative painting in the 1980s. His firework career spanned the decade – from 1981, when his raw, rudimentary figures astonished a New York wearying of minimalist chic, until 1988, when he died of a drug overdose. He would have celebrated his 50th birthday next month, an anniversary marked by Europe's first Basquiat retrospective, recently opened at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris.