Like Wyeth, Basquiat experienced early gallery success and had his first one-man show in Italy in 1981, also at the age of 20. He was a determined and ambitious teenager who was a product of the 80’s and who sought out Warhol (according to the museum's press release), "not so much to learn about painting, but to learn how to become a celebrity."
According to art historian Robert Rosenblum, Basquiat was a "crazy kid from Brooklyn who... began his meteoric career by raucously embracing a counter-cultural life, living in public parks, selling painted T-shirts on the street, spraying graffiti on city walls, succumbing to cocaine and heroin, and using a garbage-can lid as his painter's palette."
Warhol and Basquiat, like Warhol and Wyeth a decade earlier, painted each other's portraits and collaborated on a series of paintings that were exhibited in 1985.
Basquiat tried Warhol's silk-screen techniques and Warhol created an "oxidation" (copper metal powder, Liquitex acrylics, and urine) portrait of Basquiat. In this process, Warhol mixed copper pigment with water and gesso and applied it to canvas. He would then pee onto this wet paint and the urine would react with the copper to make it change colors. Once dried, Warhol would silkscreen the image onto the oxidized canvas.
Still a developing artist (his painting career only spanned seven years), Basquiat died of a drug overdose a year after Warhol's unexpected death in 1987. According to Paige Powell, Warhol’s assistant who dated Basquiat, "Warhol provided fatherly advice" and Basquiat learned "how to be a professional artist, how to be a business person, how to schmooze the collectors and hold the line with the dealers."
In Basquiat’s "Sketch of Andy Warhol" (1983-84), he captures a shocking view of Warhol, exposing him in a completely different visual representation, but identical artistic insight, much like Wyeth had done in 1976. Robert Rosenblum notes in the exhibition’s catalog essay that "Warhol must also have been attracted, in a masochistic way, to the shocking candor of both Wyeth’s and Basquiat’s portraits of him."
In addition to the artwork, the exhibition is rich in peripheral materials (photographs, magazines, videos, and even Basquiat’s famed garbage-can lid palette) supporting the relationship between Warhol and the younger artists.
Article comments
1 - diana hartman
I am pleased to tell you this article is being featured in the Culture Focus today, October 6th.
Diana Hartman
Culture Editor