Description: Fascinated to learn the tale of how two unlikely artistic legends of their respective generations locked arms in the face of heated criticism? In our article, we dive into their story and how Warhol-Michel paintings eventually rose to glory.
Left to right: Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Francesco Clemente
The era since WW2 has seen the world evolve rapidly and if there was one thing constant, it was change. The generations that followed were decorated with bold new artistic frontiers breaking with long-established norms and projecting commonly held, deep-seated messages. Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, though members of consecutive generations with diametrically opposed styles, melded their graffiti and pop art together for a short while in a momentous 1984 to 1985 collaboration.
Pioneers of their own respective art movements, Warhol and Basquiat both shared passionate criticisms of the predominant social ills and corporate oppression they each encountered growing up. Today, we dive into this unlikely, short-lived union and how Warhol-Basquiat paintings rose to the limelight years after their deaths.
Background
Andy Warhol
Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Andy Warhol was perhaps the most prolific personality to spearhead the pop art movement, dazzling admirers with things like advertisements, comic books, and celebrities. He saw spectacular success as a commercial illustrator. In the New York art scene, he began to see the role corporate imagery played all around us from a day-to-day, close-and-personal lens.
When he grew up, the standard for art was totally different. Detailed, careful strokes depicting images like religious icons, leaders, nature, and home environments were regarded as the only proper way to portray life. Warhol dared to redefine art’s possibilities, immortalizing a different shade of reality to be beheld in museums – mass consumption, capitalism, and celebrities. He pioneered silkscreen printing, which allowed him to express repetitive mass production in the form of his analogous nearly identical batches of bold-outlined paintings.
Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, Andy Warhol’s most famous painting
Andy Warhol’s most popular pieces were his:
- 1964 Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, shown above, was purchased in 2022 for $195 million;
- Series of 32 Campbell’s soup cans, each of a different variety;
- Eight Elvises, which sold for $100 million in 2008;
- 112 Green Coca-Cola bottles;
- 199 Mao portraits;
Characteristic of pop art, his paintings featured hues like hot pink, fiery orange, and aqua. He would later bring these same themes to the Warhol-Basquiat paintings. Silk-screening is now a fixture in contemporary art movements.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat
The trilingual, mixed-race Brooklyn boy was born in 1960 where he frequented museums growing up. At 7, he was hit by a car, an edition of Gray’s Anatomy from his mom helping keep him occupied at the hospital, the skeletal and anatomical motifs of which would end up reverberating in his neo-expressionism. As a teen, he dropped out of high school, lived in abandoned buildings, and took right to expressing his struggles and torments in the form of graffiti, an undertaking then deemed as nothing more than vandalism.
This project he jointly launched under the pseudonym “SAMO” (for “Same Old Shit”). In addition to anatomy, his contributions to the New York art scene centered around things like:
- Racial discrimination
- Income disparities
- Class struggles
- Imperfections of mundane, city life
- Drug use
His feelings bled right off his masterpieces, maintaining a raw, abstract, graffiti-like intensity giving off the impression as if it were hastily drawn. In line with the cold reality he lived in, the meaning of his works was not limited to the surface. Instead, they are full of multiple, bold-colored layers featuring subtle images, captions (often crossed out), and images that don’t catch the eye until zeroing in more closely. He thus threw a gutsy challenge at 1970s expressionism.
His provocative neo-expressionism spoke to the languishing realities screaming from within among mistreated citizens that all too often don’t seem to show up in the public light. Jean-Michel Basquiat had experienced homelessness and not being taken seriously by other artists due to his race first hand in the art scene in New York. Such were frequent motifs in many of his resonating pieces.
Basquiat’s most famous painting, Untitled (1982)
These included the likes of:
- Untitled (1982), shown above: a head full of colorful chaos depicting human emotions and stitches representing brokenness. This sold for 110.5 million in 2017;
- Irony of a Negro Policeman: highlighting the irony of black people enforcing race-based, abusive authority;
- Hollywood Africans: bemoaning the stereotypes perpetuated about black people in the entertainment industry sold for 27.9 million in 2018;
- Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump: a striking image of a young Black boy and a dog set against a fiery background;
- Dustheads: two neurotic figures resembling ghosts, alternative consciousness, delirium, and death, depicting drug life;
The 1980s New York Art Scene
Countless creative souls came to the big apple for 1980s art collaborations. East Village was a nexus of artistic fusion along with LGBT residents, hip-hop lovers, and worshipers of glamour.
Artists themselves emerged as household names, establishing a brand-new genre of obsessive followings. Such sudden success proved often too much to handle as it led famous artists of all crafts astray down a road of alcoholism, poorly thought-out decisions, and drugs.
1980s art collaborations commonly reflected:
- communism;
- racial unrest;
- police brutality;
- the war on drugs waged on, with crack killing as many as 2 per 100,000 people;
- powerful corporations’ mistreatment of lower classes, as Warhol-Basquiat paintings commonly depicted;
- the AIDS epidemic.
Collaboration
Andy Warhol had built his own The Factory, a place to gather bright creatives and ramp up 1980s art collaborations. His methods of illustration differed radically from Jean-Michel Basquiat’s.
Warhol-Basquiat paintings kicked off when their distributor Bruno Bischofberger properly introduced them after Basquiat had risen to prominence. This wasn’t the first time they crossed paths, contrary to popular belief, as In 1979, Warhol and Basquiat met upon the latter spotting him at the W.P. A. Restaurant, who bought one of his postcards for a dollar.
A clash of beauty
| Feature | Jean-Michel Basquiat | Andy Warhol |
| Birth & Death | 1960–1988 (Pittsburgh) | 1928–1987 (Brooklyn) |
| Movement | Neo-expressionism | Pop art |
| Background | Self-taught street artist, influenced by graffiti and jazz | Commercial illustrator depicting advertising & consumer culture |
| Style | Raw, half-handed, chaotic | Repetitive, polished, with saturated hues |
| Common Themes | Race, power, wealth, mortality, African American identity | Consumerism, celebrity, mass production, media influence |
| Motifs | Skulls, insides, stitches, underappreciated jobs, minorities, crossed-out captions, erasures | Baseball mitts, Campbell’s soup cans, store products, advertising slogans, world leaders, tints, celebrities |
| Mediums Used | Acrylic, oil stick, spray paint, collage | Silkscreen, acrylic, photography, film |
| Famous Works | Untitled (1982), Hollywood Africans, Irony of a Negro Policeman | Marilyn Diptych, Campbell’s Soup Cans, Brillo Boxes |
Andy Warhol mentored Basquiat, the former a significantly older man in his 50s. Their pop art and graffiti approaches couldn’t be more different, nevertheless. Basquiat and Warhol’s 1980s art collaborations set off a friendly competition to see who could outdo the other, of course within the bounds of admiration for each other and camaraderie.
More importantly, Warhol and Basquiat converged in their criticisms of societal ills, corporate abuses, and oppression at large. The former kicked up his silk-screening to the next gear in the Warhol and Basquiat collaboration, totaling over 160 art pieces over 1984 to 1985.
Four hands paintings
Untitled (1984) of their Four Hands collaboration, featuring a clash of graffiti and pop, was sold for $19.4 million in 2024.
The Four Hands paintings were a series of 100 which Basquiat and Warhol whipped up together. Both of them took turns adding contributions to the same painting, utilizing each of Basquiat and Warhol’s signature styles – Andy Warhol’s mundane irony and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s destruction of mundane concepts. In doing so, Basquiat would expose what he viewed as the underlying reality to them with captions and replace various elements with something else.
Some of the widest-resonating of these 1980s art collaborations were:
- 1984-1985: African Mask. A ten-meter-long canvas celebrating Jean-Michel Basquiat’s deep connection to his African heritage;
- 1984-1985: General Electric with Waiter. In this piece popular in Warhol-Basquiat exhibits, Andy Warhol incorporated the GE logo symbolizing corporate power while Basquiat added a waiter, highlighting class, racial, and labor inequality.
- 1985: Ten Punching Bags. Such repetitiveness is a hallmark of Andy Warhol, injecting attitudes on institutionalized religion, blasphemy, & power. Basquiat added graffiti crowns, markings, and a “judge” caption above Jesus and the disciples.
- 1985: Olympics. Warhol created them as a symbol of global unity & corporate branding while Basquiat added chaos & criticism of commercialism in sports, reworking the rings.
- 2012: Olympics sold for 10.5 million;
- 2014: Zenith sold for 11.4 million;
- 2021: Bananas sold for 4.3 million;
- 2024: Untitled (1984) was bought for $19.4 million at Sotheby’s, the highest-priced piece Basquiat and Warhol’s legacy of collaboration produced.
Pittsburgh’s The Andy Warhol Museum showcases the legacy of Warhol and Basquiat. Joint exhibitions of Warhol Basquiat include the Broad, NYC and the MACBA in Barcelona, Spain.
Reception and Critique
In Basquiat and Warhol’s Heart Attack Plate 1, one immediately recognizes Warhol’s signature advertisements added in, followed by areas Basquiat then erased, the latter’s addition of cryptic messages, and an African element.
Much as Basquiat and Warhol enjoyed melded graffiti and pop art endeavors and the Four Hands Paintings experimentation, these joint exhibitions would not last long. What is now viewed as an iconic collaboration in art was initially hampered by sharp criticism.
One of the reasons was that at the time, artists such as Warhol and Basquiat normally stayed true to the style they were known for. People grew drawn to each of their particular styles and their admirers were not as enthusiastic about Warhol and Basquiat’s decision to shake things up as they were. Many pointed out that Andy Warhol had been past his prime since the 1960s.
Consequently, many saw the Four Hands Paintings as Andy Warhol was just trying to exploit the fame of Jean-Michel Basquiat and steal some spotlight. The New York Times for instance criticized the former, claiming he had made the latter his “mascot”. Critics roasted each of them at joint exhibitions.
A lot of people who were in the art establishment were skeptical of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s success, viewing him as an outsider. At the same time, many of Basquiat’s fans thought that his pungent messaging and depth were being watered down by Warhol’s blandness and monotony. They viewed him as selling out.
Legacy
Eggs (1985), one of the prominent Warhol-Basquiat paintings featured at joint exhibitions.
Both Basquiat and Warhol ended up sadly departing from this world too soon. First, Andy Warhol died in 1987 from complications during a gallbladder surgery at the age of 58, ruling out any possibility of them once again merging neo-expressionism and pop art after waning under public vitriol. The very next day, Jean-Michel Basquiat himself died due to heroin, at just 27 years old. One of the most famous art duos to make their influence on contemporary art was suddenly gone for good.
When Andy Warhol died, he took pop art with him. His influence on pop art and exploration of celebrity culture remains an everlasting imprint. He was among the most important figures in challenging what could be put on a canvas.
Basquiat
As for Jean-Michel Basquiat’s passing, many people wonder at the accomplishments which could’ve followed. Still, he dared to express his cultural heritage, be a neo-expressionism vanguard, and give a powerful voice for marginalized communities. His passion reverberates in contemporary art movements.
The resurgent popularity of Warhol and Basquiat’s collaboration
In the digital age, artist collaboration grew more widespread, in particular with the rise of the Internet making it more feasible for creatives to blend their gifts on a canvas. At the turn of the century, the popularity of the posthumous Warhol and Basquiat exploded as people came to appreciate Warhol and Basquiat’s graffiti and pop art concoctions.
Conclusion
Their interwoven graffiti and pop art has sold for a combined $267.3 million, rendering Basquiat and Warhol paintings among the highest-grossing experimental art partnerships ever. While their legacy of collaboration does not come near the prices commanded by so many of their solo projects, it still stands as an exaltation of the genius and the beauty both managed to achieve by embracing different approaches to the human experience, profoundly influencing contemporary art movements.
Both men enjoyed the height of fame and managed to touch millions with their contributions & bold perspectives. At last, Basquiat and Warhol’s artistic fusion has finally found the appreciation it truly deserves.