Having lived in Serbia for some time and considering myself a traveler, I never really went to neighboring countries because they were “too close for a vacation” and reminded me too much of what Serbia offers. Because of that, I always put Vienna, Austria, on a waiting list for my travel plans; Until Sophomore fall break, I decided it was time as I was missing the European cold and the lifestyle there. So I convinced my friends, and we booked the tickets to Vienna; on the plane there, all I could think about was all the museums the city has to offer, all the parks, and the art communities that spend time there, and I knew I would enjoy myself in the next ten days.
On my first day in Vienna, I decided to go to the Albertina Museum, as that one was the most recommended by everyone that had already been to this city before; When I walked into the museum, I understood why my boss told me “If you don’t go to Albertina, it’s like you didn’t see the heart of the art world in Vienna” when I walked into the museum I saw pieces by Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, and many more renowned artists. But the piece that stood out to me was not a piece by any of them; it was a piece(or rather the entire art show) by the artist Jean Michael Basquiat. The day we reached Vienna was the opening of a part of the Albertina Museum with a whole collection of pieces by him entitled “Basquiat: The Retrospective,” which precisely encapsulated fifty major works from renowned public and private collections where we could see his one of a kind visual language and with that decode the substance behind his artistic ideas; they also had a room that played a short documentary film about him, explaining the background and core moments of his life that shaped him to be the artist he once was.
I thought to myself, how did I never hear of this artist? I kept hearing celebrities like him, and Andy Warhol mentored him at some point, but who is he? Why is everyone praising him so much? I started to walk around the gallery, and I realized how much of an impact his pieces are having on me, and when I wondered why, I realized that it was because of how abstract his works are, but they somehow made sense to me in my way. As I walked around and inspected his pieces, I often associated them with “doodles” and those pieces of paper you draw random sketches on in class when you are deconcentrated. But it made so much sense; he struggled with many mental health issues and would resort to art to release it and deal with his drug addiction and complicated past. And somehow, you could see all of that in his pieces, maybe not how he intended, because I couldn’t relate to issues close to his heart as I am different. But the general idea caught my attention and made me stare at his work for a long time. One thing that moved me is that the more I would look at the art piece, the more I would see some details, sometimes some words, sometimes an unfinished game of tic tac toe in the left top corner; these small details showed me that he was using lateral thinking and applying all these shifts of an idea on one canvas and the final product would be his entire thought process rather than one singular thing depicted, which moved me because in a way I felt like I was in his brain, or that the mix of thoughts and worries in my brain is human and normal.
I ended up coming two more times that week to revisit his gallery and spend time there, look at some pieces I liked closely, and admire the mix of colors he would use; I was moved by the randomness of choice of the colors and how his overall theme was very bold colors. After I came back home from the break, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I valued him as an artist and how all he cared about was creating pieces that spoke to him, which moved me because until then, all I could think of when it came to art, is that when you display it, it is meant to send a message to the people coming to see it. Still, Basquiat’s original idea was to make art; it was that simple, and because of that, he didn’t feel restricted or cared too much about if people could make sense of his pieces, which is the confidence I felt like I always wanted and needed to progress further in my artistic expression. A few months later, I realized how much he had moved me, and I decided to tattoo his signature (the crown) to honor him and show all the impact his pieces, his art, his story, his journey, and his style have had on me.