THE ARTISTS INSPIRED EACH OTHER CREATIVELYĪs the friendship between the two artists developed, both socially and creatively, the pair began creating collaborative work. This painting, titled “Dos Cabezas” (1982), ignited the friendship between the two artists and started their journey of artistic collaboration. Later at their first lunch meeting, Warhol recalls that Basquiat “went home and within two hours a painting was back, still wet, of him and me together”. However, their first encounter was in fact a few years earlier at a restaurant in Soho, when Basquiat sold Warhol a postcard he had made with artist Jennifer Stein. When Bischofberger introduced the two in 1982, Basquiat finally got his chance to impress his idol – a surreal experience for the young artist who had always looked up to Warhol. However, it wasn’t until art dealer Bruno Bischofberger discovered Basquiat painting in lower Manhattan that his career really kicked off. In a diary entry, Warhol recalls seeing him as “the kid who used the name ‘Samo’ when he used to sit on the sidewalk in Greenwich Village and paint T-shirts, and I’d give him $10”. WARHOL ENCOURAGED BASQUIAT’S ART CAREER FROM THE STARTīefore Basquiat became a name in the art world, he dropped out of school aged 17 and started his career tagging the word SAMO on the streets with fellow artist and friend Al Diaz. Looking through these personal photographs and diary excerpts documented in Warhol on Basquiat, we unpick the relationship between the two artists, to show the truth behind it. Spanning the six years prior to this, Warhol and Basquiat’s friendship was both strengthened and tested, and can now be explored through the images and anecdotes within this book. The book has been released 32 years after Warhol’s death in 1987, when Basquiat also sadly died from an overdose the following year. Michael Dayton Hermann from the Andy Warhol Foundation selected these images from Warhol’s collection – accumulating over 130,000 photographs taken on his 35mm camera – and placed them alongside quotes from Warhol’s diary, giving “a voyeuristic glimpse” into the relationship between the two artists, for all it’s good, bad, and, at times, weirdness.
Now, a new book, Warhol and Basquiat, published by Taschen in collaboration with the Jean-Michel Basquiat Estate and the Andy Warhol Foundation, exposes the world to hundreds of never-before-published images taken by Warhol in the years that he knew Basquiat. In recent years, photographs of Warhol and Basquiat have resurfaced, but there have always been people who have criticised and questioned their friendship.
See the photo collection from 1965-1967 of Andy Warhol’s secretive Factory, as captured by Stephen Shore.When the pop art icon Andy Warhol took the aspiring artist Jean-Michel Basquiat under his wing in the 1980s, neither of them could have expected the intimate and turbulent relationship that would unfold between the two. This March, 20 of the drawings will also feature in a Warhol retrospective at the Tate Modern in London. “These drawings point to the universality of emotions …, these have been diminished as being homoerotic art as opposed to depictions of love, sex and desire.” “That these works were created by a practising Catholic in the United States at a time when sodomy was a harshly punished felony in every state illustrates that, even at a young age, Warhol embraced the role of the nonconformist.” To Hermann, the drawings show how Warhol was an artist “who put sexuality at the centre of his work from day one…challenging the world to see things differently and he wasn’t successful at it in the 1950s because people weren’t ready for it.” Pearlstein tried to get The Tanager Gallery to display the drawings, but found they refused to show drawings of young men “with their tongues in each other’s mouth”. One story came from 1959, when Warhol approached former roommate, Philip Pearlstein, for help exhibiting the drawings. Whilst making the book, Hermann collected anecdotes from people surrounding Warhol at the time. Of mirth, music and multiple Monroes: how Andy Warhol left an imprint on the sphere of pop culture forever. “There isn’t a barrier between the artist and the subject … It’s a much more personal and intimate way to capture someone and it tells you a lot about the artist as much as the subject.” “When you have a drawing of someone, the artist’s hand is there,” he described.