Description
The Basquiat story from the woman who lived it. Jennifer Clement’s Widow Basquiat is the memoir-biography of Suzanne Mallouk — the beautiful, troubled woman who was Jean-Michel Basquiat’s great love during his meteoric rise and fall. Told in Mallouk’s own haunting voice, it is the most intimate portrait we have of the brilliant, doomed painter.
Basquiat went from subway graffiti (SAMO) to gallery stardom to heroin death at 27 in less than a decade. Clement — who knew them both — lets Suzanne tell it: the loft on Great Jones Street, the famous friends, the genius curdling into paranoia. It is a love story and a horror story at once, told in fragments that cut like glass.
Essential for Basquiat obsessives: the human heart inside the myth. Beautiful, devastating, and unlike any other art book you own. You will read it in one sitting. Clement’s spare, poetic prose suits the material perfectly — a downtown elegy like no other.
Widow Basquiat is the beautifully written, deeply affecting story of Suzanne Mallouk — the lover and muse who stood beside Jean-Michel Basquiat during his brief, blazing years in 1980s New York.
n
n
New York in the eighties was a wild, mesmerizing place: a hotbed of hip hop, underground culture, and unmatched creative energy. It was where Basquiat, a graffiti-savvy street kid turned avant-garde painter, shot to worldwide fame before his death at twenty-seven. At the center of those years was Suzanne — a runaway from an unhappy home in Canada who first met Jean-Michel in a Lower East Side bar in 1980.
n
n
Jennifer Clement, a friend of Suzanne’s, tells their story as a first-person narrative in Suzanne’s own voice, tracing a tumultuous and passionate relationship marked by devotion, obsession, and heroin addiction. The result is a poetic, unsparing portrait of an artist at his peak and the woman who loved him through it.
n
n
An NPR Best Book of the Year selection, Widow Basquiat is essential reading for anyone drawn to modern art, downtown New York, or love stories that refuse to look away.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet