Basquiat Warhol - Psychophysical Dialogues (en) - a podcast by CastYourArt.com

Basquiat Warhol - Psychophysical Dialogues
The exhibition Warhol Basquiat in the Bank Austria Kunstforum in Vienna provides unique insights into the creative process of two very different artistic personalities.

According to the Swiss art dealer and gallery owner Bruno Bischofberger who met Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1981, and out of whose collection a good part of the works in this exhibition are on loan, the idea for the project has been conceived during a visit of Jean-Michel Basquiat to Saint Moritz, when he drew a picture together with the 3-year old daughter of the gallerist. Bischofberger felt that the child’s naïve style and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s conscious primitivism were very well matched.
Bruno Bischofberger proposed collaboration with other artists of his gallery (including Francesco Clemente) to Andy Warhol who agreed, and a first exhibition with 15 paintings was organized. In the years 1984 and 1985, each artist produced five pictures and then sent them to the other. In the following project Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat worked together in New York and became friends during their cooperation. Originally the participation of Julian Schnabel was planned but was abandoned because of personal disagreements with Julian Schnabel, who eventually made a film about Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1996.
The poster of the exhibition shows the two artists posing as boxers, which reflect the contrasts of character and conception, as a physical dialogue on various levels: personality, artistic style, and generation. Both styles gain their inspiration from the imagery of everyday life, transgressing the limitations between art, advertisement and street art. In the combined compositions, hermetic and hieroglyphic references to death and other subjects of both artists’ private universes become visible; the symbolic keys to the worlds of Andy Warhol or Jean-Michel Basqiuat appear before the viewer in all the complexity of their synthesis.
Often Andy Warhols paintings were worked over by Jean-Michel Basquiat in quite a brutal manner, which nevertheless seems to have been a productive influence on Andy Warhol. He began to experiment again and let the raw style of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting inspire him. Special rooms in the exhibition are dedicated to Andy Warhol’s late works that went back to techniques of his early times. The final painting of the show is Andy Warhol’s Last Supper after Leonardo da Vinci.
While the wild approach of Jean-Michel Basquiat had an inspiring effect on Andy Warhol, a certain influence of Andy Warhol on Jean-Michel Basquiat is also evident, as Jean-Michel Basquiat started to use screen printing in his work and applied photocopies on his canvasses.
The collaborations are in the centre of the exhibition, but there are also important single works of both artists of the same period, for example the humorous portrait of Andy Warhol as a banana by Jean-Michel Basquiat, as a reference to Andy Warhol’s cover of the debut album of The Velvet Underground § Nico.
In this exhibition, curator Florian Steininger takes care to focus on the artistic relevance of Jean-Michel Basquiat and not on the scandalous aspects of his biography. In 1988, one year after the death of Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a drug overdose, at the age of 27. Today the works of both artists sell for millions of dollars, even though at the time the press as well as the art market was not convinced of their collaborations. Andy Warhol was used to bad press; Jean-Michel Basquiat seemed to be so disappointed that the collaborations ended, after two years of cooperation and one exhibition. (written by Cem Angeli)

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