PARIS – There are vanishingly few great collaborations in the annals of fine art. For a brief moment in the 1980s, Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat showed the world how it was done.
It started with a bang. Warhol, 54, met Basquiat, 22, for lunch in October 1982 and took a polaroid of them together.
Basquiat took it to his studio and returned just two hours later with a portrait. Warhol was stunned by its brilliance.
Soon they were working together on portraits that combined their favoured tropes: Basquiat’s masks, skulls, graffiti and obscure symbols; Warhol’s pop-art imagery, logos and newspaper headlines.
The brief, intense collaboration…
