The exhibition to see: Warhol and Basquiat, from a Polaroid to paintings with four hands

“A successful collaboration is always the result of a successful relationship”, noted Keith Haring, in the fall of 1988, about the joint works of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, two months after the death by overdose of this last, at the age of 27. The previous year, it was Warhol who passed away after surgery, and that was the end of the improbable and fruitful duo formed by two artists who were completely opposed. On the one hand, Andy, a “shy and polite” fifty-year-old pop art star who was then a pope in the New York artistic sphere. On the other, Jean-Michel, “aggressive and direct”, a young prodigy still stammering from the local underground scene. From adolescence, the second, eager for recognition, seeks to get closer to the first. In vain, until the decisive meeting of October 4, 1982, when the Swiss gallery owner Bruno Bischofberger, their common dealer, brought them together at the Factory, the time of a Polaroid taken by Warhol and a canvas executed in less than two hours in stride by Basquiat. From there was born this fruitful collaboration between two figures of generations, backgrounds and styles that could not be more different.

At the Louis-Vuitton Foundation, the exhibition which recounts and analyzes the phenomenon has been a hit since its opening on April 5. It must be said that these compositions produced with four hands during a short period – from the end of 1983 to September 1985 – had never given rise to a meeting on the picture rails of such magnitude: of the 160 works committed by the tandem, a little more than half are gathered here. And the association between the two artists, long considered anecdotal, is deciphered by the menu, enriched with photographs and archival films that retrace the context against a backdrop of feverish creation, disco fiesta and devastating AIDS. With, in the role of the consultant-lender, Bischofberger, key witness of what was played between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

“Mascot of Art”

At the start, it’s a six-handed adventure, Francesco Clemente participating in it with his delicate line which struggles to fit into the rhythm imposed by his companions. Quite quickly, the trio becomes a duo, and the epic seems to take on its full meaning. Warhol opens the ball on the white canvas by silkscreening advertising logos or fragments of press titles. Then Basquiat erases, paints heads or bodies, throws large areas of color here and there, until he takes over his elder. But, from 1984, galvanized by these exchanges, Andy took up the brushes he had abandoned twenty years earlier, while the paintings gained in monumentality and read like a succession of staves on a score, like FleshofAfrican Masks orOlympic Rings. On this last canvas, inspired by the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, Warhol painted the emblem of the Olympic Games which Basquiat transposed into an African-American manifesto by placing a black face on it and obstructing rings to transform the Olympic symbol into a chain.

The fifteen joint works exhibited in New York at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in September 1985 flopped, critics reproaching Basquiat for turning himself into a “mascot of the art world” in front of his mentor. Their artistic collaboration will stop there but their friendship will last until the disappearance of Warhol. To leave to posterity “two extraordinary minds that merge to create a third, unique and totally distinct”, said Haring in reference to the Third Mind (“third spirit”) by Burroughs, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s favorite writer.