Warhol/Basquiat: the clash of the titans

About the exhibition "Basquiat, Warhol, à quatre mains", on view at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris until 28 August.

It took 25 years for Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat's joint works of art to finally catch the eye of the art market! Unbelievable but true: their 1985 exhibition at Tony Shafrazi's art gallery in New York was a huge flop! Not only did their works of art for sale fail to find buyers, but the critics also slammed them. In both the New York Times and the New York Times Magazine, journalists saw Basquiat as a kind of mascot who had been vamped by Warhol... Their friendship would never recover from this knockout.

For two years, however, the two artists had been completely carried away by their creative enthusiasm, meeting every day at the Factory to work together from 1983 to 1985. They produced over one hundred and sixty paintings, including some very large ones, and the Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger, who had allowed them to meet in 1982, immediately wanted to organise this exhibition when he discovered the scope and genius of this four-handed work. With a poster showing Warhol and Basquiat as boxers ready to face each other in the art ring, the visionary already saw the clash of the titans. But that's all there is to it. Apart from a few timid presentations in art galleries, the corpus of these incredible collaborative works remained in the shadows until 2011, when the Museum of Modern Art in Denmark brought them back into the spotlight. The Austrian art historian and curator Dieter Buchhart was co-curator of the Danish exhibition. He is also co-curator of the exhibition now on show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, the scope of which surpasses anything that has been done previously on this unique collaboration in the history of art. No less than a hundred works, most of which have never been shown in Europe, are currently on display at the Foundation. And it is the event of the year.

It was hard for the two of them to meet. Of course, the young Basquiat idolised Warhol, like everyone else at the time, and he had even managed to sell him one of his postcard-sized collages in 1979. But the mayonnaise didn't take. The black underground still frightened the Pope of Pop Art, whose aura was beginning to wane. So much so that, with hindsight, the question arises as to which one really needed the other! Hip-hop and rap were chanting Basquiat's brushstrokes as he covered the walls of SoHo with his graffiti in the company of Al Diaz. His energy was overflowing when the star's was running out of steam. But it was not until their common gallery owner introduced them that things clicked.

"In the autumn of 1982, I took Jean-Michel to see Andy Warhol at the Factory," Bruno Bischofberger recalls. "I had a firm agreement from Warhol that I could submit articles on young artists that I thought were interesting for Interview - a magazine we had founded together in 1969. (...) Warhol photographed Basquiat with his special Polaroid portrait. Jean-Michel asked him if he could also photograph him; he took some pictures and asked me to take pictures of him with Warhol. We were supposed to go next door for the traditional cold buffet, but Basquiat didn't want to stay (...). We had barely finished lunch (...) when Basquiat's assistant appeared with a double portrait of Warhol and Basquiat on a canvas measuring 150 x 150 cm, still fresh: Andy, on the left, in his typical pose, with his chin resting on his hand, and Basquiat, on the right, with his hair in a mess, as he had it at the time. The painting was called Dos Cabezas.

Andy Warhol was 55 and Jean-Michel Basquiat 23 when the Swiss art dealer and gallery owner brought them together again in the autumn of 1983, along with Francesco Clemente, then 31, an Italian painter whom he also represented on the art market. His idea was to have them create a sort of exquisite corpse, rotating the paintings between their three studios, each one responding to the proposal of the previous one. And it was at this point that Warhol and Basquiat began another work together, four-handed and completely independent of this initial project, if we are to believe the article by Véronique Bouruet-Auberto published in the April issue of Connaissance des arts. "He (Warhol) started most of the paintings. He would put something very concrete or recognizable like a newspaper headline or a logo and then I would sort of disfigure it and work on it again," Basquiat explained in 1985. "A real collaboration began in the sense that each remained true to himself and reacted to the other's proposal in a kind of permanent dialogue," emphasises Dieter Buchhart.

And that is what is so exciting about this exhibition. To feel, in front of each painting, the mixed energy of two men whom everything opposed. Their generation, their background, their style of painting, their iconographic repertoire, the stage of their personal evolution, their physicality... everything was superimposed, intertwined, and their contribution was clearly mutual, even if this was not understood at the time. In addition to restoring his taste for painting, Basquiat opened Warhol up to the political concerns of his time, to the point of making him a committed artist... and that's no mean feat! "The radicalism of the Warhol/Basquiat collaboration has still not been digested by the world of culture and art," observes Tony Shafrazi, the Iranian-American artist and gallery owner who exhibited the results of this impressive work in 1985. When you think that the works of art for sale in his New York gallery were not at all popular, and you can't even imagine what they must be worth today on the art market, you realise that it is sometimes necessary to take a step back to appreciate works of art at their true value...

Illustration: Michael Halsband, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat #143 New York City, July 10, 1985
Michael Halsband