“Basquiat: The World of Jean-Michel” pairs a decade of research with a starry cast of contributors for a new coffee table book.
Luxury book publisher Assouline has announced the release of Basquiat: The World of Jean-Michel, a lavish 348-page retrospective exploring the life and revolutionary career of the late art world icon.
Priced at $1,400, the hand-bound volume features more than 200 artworks and archival photographs. The expansive tome is the latest addition to Assouline’s “Ultimate Collection,” a series of large-format, artisanal editions aimed at high-end collectors.
The book’s publication arrives amid a seemingly endless hot streak in the Basquiat market. In 2025, his 1981 canvas “Crowns (Peso Neto)” sold at Sotheby’s for $48.3 million. Another major 1983 work, “Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown)”, is expected to fetch more than $45 million at a Sotheby’s auction later this month. And Basquiat famously holds the auction record for an American artist set in 2017, when his 1982 skull painting, “Untitled,” sold for a staggering $110.5 million.
Developed in partnership with international art advisory Colour Themes, the latest Assouline release is the result of a decade of research by co-founders Philip Rebeiz and CJ Jones. Rather than a standard chronological monograph, the text is organized into six thematic chapters analyzing Basquiat’s recurring motifs, including his obsession with anatomical heads, the influence of New York City’s gritty urban landscape in the 1980s, and his usage of silkscreens.
Basquiat died of a heroin overdose in 1988 at age 27, and the book marks nearly 40 years since his untimely death. It features a wide-ranging cast of celebrity contributors, from those who knew the Brooklyn-born art legend personally to those influenced by his massive cultural footprint. Living contributors to the book include artists George Condo and Francesco Clemente, art dealer Jeffrey Deitch, collector Peter Brant, and rocker Lenny Kravitz.
The eminently collectible volume also incorporates the voices of late cultural figures such as fellow ’80s art phenom Keith Haring, critic and author bell hooks, and Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger, who served as Basquiat’s exclusive representative from 1982 until the artist’s death in 1988.
“This is a project that goes beyond an overview or a specific aspect of Basquiat’s multifaceted art,” Bischofberger—who died last week at 86 and also represented Andy Warhol—is quoted as saying in the book. The physical design of the volume notably pays homage to Basquiat’s penchant for non-traditional materials.
It’s all housed in a handsome clamshell case crafted from a tactile fabric intended to resemble a painting’s raw canvas. Visit assouline.com for more information.
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