Jean Michel Basquiat has been one of the most prolific and creative artists with about 600 paintings, well over 1000 drawings and other sculpture and mixed media works. He was a poet as much as an artist, his pieces heavily focused on the visual word, dealing with issues of racism and colonialism.

His notebooks are in a way works of art in their own right and give us a picture of the New York art scene of his days as authentic as it gets. Basquiat, the Brooklyn-born icon, is the subject of a seminal new exhibition “The Unknown Notebooks”, that shows the pages of eight of the artist’s notebooks for the very first time – staged by the Brooklyn Museum, an institution that a young Basquiat was a junior member of and visited frequently himself.

The exhibition showcases 160 unbound notebook pages featuring fully conceived artworks, alongside 30 drawings, paintings and mixed-media works from private collections and the artist’s estate.

SHARE THIS ARTICLE “Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks” Brooklyn Museum, through 23 August, www.brooklynmuseum.org

Basquiat favoured the composition notebooks that were used ubiquitously by American students. The notebooks on display are from the collection of Larry Warsh, a New York-based publisher and early collector of Basquiat works. Dating from 1979 to 1987/88, they were carefully unbound in the 1990s, but have never been exhibited until now.

Displayed chronologically in order of development, the notebook pages allow viewers to observe and consider Basquiat’s enigmatic style on a highly intimate level. Written only on the right-hand pages of the notebooks, mostly in block capital lettering in black ink, the small-scale works often feature ideas and concepts that would go on to appear in Basquiat’s larger pieces, like ‘Famous Negro Athletes’ (1981) and ‘Untitled (Crown)’ (1982) which are also on display.