Basquiat x Warhol at Fondation Louis Vuitton — sparks fly in dazzling collaborations

On October 4 1982, art dealer Bruno Bischofberger invited 21-year-old Jean-Michel Basquiat to meet his hero, Andy Warhol, over lunch. Warhol took a Polaroid shot, Basquiat seized the photograph, ran back to his studio and two hours later had a painting, still wet, delivered to the table: the double portrait “Dos Cabezas” (Two Heads). 

On one side, a glacial, thin-lipped Warhol, his skin and wig painted in de Kooning’s soft pinks and greys, looks out with his gleaming voyeur’s eye. On the other, against a bright blue ground, beams Basquiat with a cartoon grin and dreadlocks in thick luscious strokes, recalling Franz Kline’s blacks. It’s a raw, direct image, gritty as an urban mural, yet showing sophisticated knowledge of art history.

“Oh I’m so jealous! He’s faster than me,” Warhol exclaimed. He had previously encountered Basquiat the teenage graffitist, “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 here and there”. Now, the canvas declared, Basquiat the handsome, hot neo-expressionist painter was challenger to Warhol, Pop art’s king of cool.

At the entrance to the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s lavish exhibition Basquiat x Warhol: Painting Four Hands in Paris, “Dos Cabezas” hangs back-to-back with “Arm and Hammer II”, which the two artists made together. Warhol painted the logo of the baking soda company in two circles; in one, Basquiat replaced the flexed white baker’s arms with a black saxophonist based on Charlie Parker. Blue spheres of musical notes float up from his saxophone on to Warhol’s gold ground, reminiscent of his golden “Marilyn”s. Joyful and witty, Basquiat’s message claiming space for black creativity is clear.

Basquiat x Warhol is the most comprehensive account yet shown of a rollercoaster friendship, begun in the highest spirits. In his 1983 drawing “Foto (Jean-Michel Basquiat being photographed by Andy Warhol)”, the younger artist depicts himself at the top of a staircase, a wiry leaping stick-figure with orange head and bulging eyes, while Warhol, a ghoul in a tapering cape, is on a lower step, angling his camera. His “Jean-Michel Basquiat Six Polaroids”, the same year, fragmented nude depictions, were subsequently collaged into the contrapposto silkscreen “Portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat as David”. Basquiat countered with the comedy “Brown Spots (Portrait of Andy Warhol as a Banana)”, the long face appearing as the fruit is peeled back — the white man in the jungle.

When Bischofberger suggested that they work together, it felt like a natural progression for both. Warhol was fired up by Basquiat’s rebellious energy — and, having not touched a brush for years, by his commitment to paint. Basquiat, although already selling well, was intoxicated by Warhol’s fame, and his restless hybrid style — fusing comics, hieroglyphs, references to music, films, paintings — lent itself to collaborative effort.

For their large-scale joint canvases, Warhol put down the background, usually a handmade graphic image of a famous logo: say, the looped letters GE within an ornamental circle, emblem of General Electric, powerhouse of America. Basquiat then adorned, effaced, defaced, added colour and layered his own contributions, sometimes simply — the black skull at the centre of “GE/Skull”; the graceful figure of a black server bearing gin and tonic in “General Electric with Waiter”, plus one of his little graffiti cars struggling uphill across the logo — and sometimes with complex references. Repeatedly, his concern with race trumped Warhol’s motifs of commodity capitalism.

Do the collaborations represent the best or the worst of each artist, a happy or a desperate union of age and youth, or a dealer’s cynical ploy?

“General Electric” is bisected by a ladder to nowhere, topped by a rocket lying on its side and two heads reprising the double portrait: a velvety deep black one and a flurry of abstract marks suggesting the wigged, weary Warhol. From the brilliant yellow “Sweet Pungent”, scrawled with wobbly diagrams of machinery and the words “flies” and “fleas”, leaps a black figure with mask face and fists raised in the Black Power salute. This decorative piece was once owned by fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger.

The Paramount series, similar dazzles of competing imagery, contrasting hues and all-over marks playing across film company Paramount’s star-encircled logo, is led here by “China Paramount”, dominated by six exquisitely painted mask-heads denoting black and Asian stereotypes. Its first owner was Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes, who said: “It seemed to tell the story of what was going on in the middle of the 1980s. ’Cause it had the chaos and the cultural clashes . . . it was sharp and modern . . . they were a pair of mavericks that had found each other and made these incredible pieces.”

But if musicians and fashion designers understood creative collaboration, 1980s art critics did not. Shown in 1985, the joint works were panned, The New York Times calling Basquiat Warhol’s “mascot”. Basquiat dropped Warhol like a hot coal. Three years later both were dead.

Individually, their status since has never been in doubt. But the collaborations remain problematic: do they represent the best or the worst of each artist, a happy or a desperate union of age and youth, or just a dealer’s cynical ploy?

Across Fondation Louis Vuitton’s broad range, one senses, variously, all those things. Some works are undoubtedly banal, but the entire group reads like an extended conversation, veering between chatter, jokes (the Denture series riffing on the American smile is studded with Basquiat’s toothy devils; snakes and rats loop through the Dollar Sign pictures), evolving thoughts, flashes of insight and outbursts of monologue.

Particularly moving is the quiet comment “Collaboration (Chairs/African)”: Warhol outlined two white wicker chairs, which stand empty; beneath them, Basquiat’s black figure squats on the ground. But hanging opposite, the glorious 10-metre “African Masks”, a frieze of heads referencing tribal art, Picasso and television cartoons celebrates the black figure triumphant, culminating in a map of Africa as a black face spewing fire.

The show’s great finale is the nocturne “Taxi, 45th/Broadway”, formerly owned by fashion designer Gianni Versace. The luminous taxi, outlined by a projector with classic Warholian detachment and economy, speeds across the canvas, the structural anchor for a Basquiat anecdote: the white driver, spurting graffiti expletives, declines a black passenger, leaving him on the dark pavement, dissolving into beautiful black/purple streaks stamped with the word “Negro”. Basquiat, wealthy and successful in art circles, was customarily refused by taxi drivers and at restaurants; here is his revenge in paint, making the invisible black figure visible.

This is a fascinating show: for its exploration of how collaboration works, or doesn’t; for the convergence of Pop art’s flat neutrality with Basquiat’s gestural and emotive extravaganzas; and above all for its sociopolitical resonance today. Within this potent evocation of divisive 1980s America, it is absolutely compelling to watch the drama of a young black artist effectively over-painting the work of a white cultural icon.

April 5-August 28, fondationlouisvuitton.fr

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