![{I just found this on my hard drive: if you like art, maybe you’ll like it. Or you’ll know a lot about art and think I’m fucking retarded. Whatever. Andy and Jean-Michel Basquiat RULE.
Two Most Wanted Men:
Andy Warhol and his Influence on Jean-Michel Basquiat
In the early 1960’s, America found itself immersed in a world of consumerism. The generations following World War II called for newer, better, machine-oriented products to make everyday life more convenient. In 1963, Andy Warhol opened The Factory at East 47th street in New York City producing repetitious images of Coca-Cola bottles, Brillo Pads, and Campbell’s Soup, de-symbolizing the same products that fueled America’s obsession with the massed-produced. “I want to be a machine,”[1] proclaimed Warhol. Always the wittier, Warhol’s comment wasn’t too far from the common consensus of the nuclear family, sitting cozily within their homes watching Oscar Meyer commercials on their television sets. Much like the famous images and people represented in their body of works, both Andy Warhol and his student/friend/protégé, Jean-Michel Basquiat grew to become the synonymous icons for the genre of Pop Art. Laurence Alloway, the critic responsible for first coining the term, claims, “Pop art is neither abstract nor realistic, though it has contacts in both directions. The core of Pop art is at neither frontier; it is, essentially, an art about signs and sign systems.”[2] Together and on their own Warhol and Basquiat served as the communicators of an intrinsic artistic language, identifiable in the streets and around the world, using images, words, and symbols to deliver their message of creativity, anti-consumerism, and their take on our material-based culture.
In the early sixties Andy Warhol broke out on the American Pop movement creating, painting, illustrating, filmmaking, and even dabbling in advertising. His works revolved around the similar themes and imagery as his Pop predecessors, Roy Lichtenstein and Richard Hamilton—using comic books, cartoon characters such as Popeye. Alloway further notes, “Pop art deals with material that already exists as signs: photographs, brand goods, comics—that is to say, with pre-coded material. The subject matter of Pop art, at one level, is known to the spectator in advance of seeing the use the artist makes of it.”[3] Marco Livingston, author of Pop Art: An International Perspective argues, “Unlike satire, which confronts its targets from a superior position, Pop Art appears as a subversive force emanating from within the very consumerist myths and representations that it calls into question.”
In following years Warhol began to focus his artwork on a process known as silk-screen, immortalizing recognizable iconic female figures such as Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.
“The work by which Warhol prefers to be known dates from his use of the silk screen in 1962. Here he selects a photographic image, transfers in enlarged to a silk screen, which can then be put down on the canvas and inked from the back. His subjects—women like Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, and Jackie Kennedy—represent topical climaxes of glamour and also of suffering. The torments of celebrities take place, at least in part, in public, and Warhol is a master of the goldfish bowl effect that modern communication has produced.”
Through these repetitious works of art, particularly 25 Colored Marilyns, Andy hoped to de-symbolize and demystify these internationally famous American products and celebrities, while recognizing their star status. “His most famous portrait series, that of Marilyn Monroe…is as much about the pathos of celebrity identification as about celebration of the star…in his reduction of the fine-grained color of the Monroe photograph to a one-dimensional monochrome, the imaginary life is drawn out of it.”[6] He believed that once we grew accustomed to seeing these images over and over, which we as Americans are already used to, the idea of what they represent would simply fade away. Alloway writes: “Warhol uses the ready-made, such as photography from the public domain, to saturate his art with life’s traces. The texture of visual and social reality that photographs convey is an essential part of his art.”
After his Marilyn series, Warhol began mass-producing images of Brillo Pads, Campbell’s Soup cans, and Coca-Cola bottles. Rather than allude to our obsession with American products, Warhol solidifies his claim. These repetitious silk-screens and images of him sitting with his beloved Brillo Pad boxes are what Warhol is most famous for.
In 1982 Andy Warhol befriended legendary New York street graffiti Artist Jean Michel Basquiat. For years the Puerto-Rican born Basquiat bummed around the areas of New York City’s SOHO district, making ends meet, painting during all hours of the night, and scrawling his famous SAMO pseudonym (a code for Same Old Shit) and crown wherever it might be best seen. Leonhard Emmerling, author of Basquiat writes:
“Looking past his childlike means of depicting the big city and to the actual image of human beings in his work, Basquiat’s work is clearly an art of rage and rebellion. But it always retains, if in reduced form, the cunning word games from his graffiti period to the later paintings and drawings.
By this time, Basquiat was already heavy into using intravenous drugs, experimenting with cocaine and black-tar heroin. On a steady diet of drugs, coffee, meager sustenance and many cigarettes, Basquiat invigorated his already wild style, combining chalk, graffiti art expressionism, and a distinct use of symbolism and repetitious images; which is particularly attributed to the influence of early Warhol. “Of course, what he painted was repetitive; he constantly reprised earlier inventions, especially those that sold well on the art market and that had advanced to trademarks.”[8] Basquiat wore a crown in the New York art scene; a drawing that later became his signature image. Although Basquiat was not as kitschy as his older counterpart, he did draw many of his influences from the impact of Pop art. “Pop art is a part of a wider predisposition toward the reintroduction of imagery and the use of quotes sources among the generation of artists that followed abstract expressionism.”[9] Basquiat clearly already had his own particular style; Warhol simply provided a much wider outlet for his expressive angry artwork. Once they had made each other’s acquaintance, the two quickly began painting, eating, and spending much of their days attached at the hip. Basquiat was Warhol’s protégé—another project he could sink his Pop teeth into.
“It seemed like a perfect match, the beginning of a success story for the long term. Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, the most famous white artist and the most famous black artist, both equally at home in the art scene…both profiteering off each other: the one gaining a protégé who was a genius, the other gaining a patron and father figure of worldwide renown.”[10]
Soon Warhol and Basquiat were officially collaborating, backed by art dealers Tony Shafrazi and Bruno Bischofberger (who actually convinced Basquiat to work with Warhol), holding gallery showings of their collaborative effort at a Mercer Street Gallery in SoHo, New York. Both artists, and specifically, the decoder messages hidden between the incoherent all-over words of Basquiat, used repetitious images and symbols serving as active tongue-in-cheek comments on postwar American popular culture and human obsession with materials of the mass-produced. In the Warhol/Basquiat collaboration titled Bananas, 1984, these two men combine both their methods of communicating a comment, an idea, and most often, a message. Warhol’s famous banana (later made internationally recognized by Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground when Warhol produced and designed their “NICO” album) is located at the top of the piece, pealed and whole. Below it is the General Electric emblem, turned upside down. Quoted on his usage of symbols and logos, “Warhol said: ‘I adore America and these are some comments on it. My image is a statement of the symbols of the harsh, impersonal products and brash materialistic objects on which America is built today. It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, the practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us.’”[11] Lawrence Alloway further wrote, “No one painting can exhaust an image’s meaning; each painting is a part of a group that extends into the world beyond its edges. It is this sustained flow of images that acts as a metaphor, though not as the fact, of mass production.”
In 1963 Andy Warhol took out art-space on the fifth floor of 231 East 47th Street in Manhattan. This creative space controlled by Warhol was what soon became known as The Factory—New York socialite elites and artists alike could hang out and watch the creative process of Warhol. Some years later, he co-optioned a later locale with Basquiat, also dubbed The Factory. The name for the artistic space/party hangout was no coincidence. “[Most of the images produced in The Factory] divided along the line of either referential or as simulacral (a simulacrum is a copy without an apparent original, and in his image repetitions the original often does appear to dissolve.”[13] The purpose of this, according to Roland Barthes, author of “That Old Thing Art” was, “to release the image from deep meaning into sumlacral surface.”[14] Warhol also used this technique of repetition in his work White Burning Car III in 1963. Warhol had most of his works made by other people in his studio, reproducing the image from the original; The Factory proved to be the perfect name for his art space.
Through such works as Lavender Disaster, 1963, and White Burning Car III, 1963, Warhol sought to lend his efforts to express “the reality of suffering and death”[15] by hitting his audience over the head with brutal images of the aforementioned. Responding to the question “When did you start with the ‘Death’ series?” Warhol proclaimed, “I guess it was the big plane crash picture, the front page of a newspaper: 129 DIE. I was also painting the Marilyns. I realized that everything I was doing must have been about Death…But when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect…”
The biggest impact Andy Warhol had on Jean-Michel Basquiat was his use of the ready-made object. Warhol drew on objects such as refrigerator doors, and often used found photography, such as the images of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy. As stated above, Basquiat began his career by spray-painting his famous SAMO graffiti tag around the lower parts of Manhattan. Before even meeting Andy Warhol, Basquiat was using found objects to paint and draw on because he couldn’t afford canvas and fancy paint. Unlike Warhol, who primarily used mass-produced objects and advertisements in his works, Basquiat used much more street-found objects. Basquiat would get his artistic hands on anything he could: benches, walls, restaurant placards, and wooden boxes. Any flat surface served as a canvas in the eyes of Basquiat. In a famous scene in the Miramax movie Basquiat, the actor portraying the famous artists takes soy sauce and chopsticks and makes it into a small work of found object, making a complete mess at the upscale restaurant, Mr. Chow. It perfectly depicts Basquiat’s use of anything and everything, a trick that truly amused Warhol and their contemporaries.
Unfortunately, at the young age of 27, Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose. His rise to overnight stardom, much with the help of his mentor Andy Warhol, was too much for him to handle. One minute he was dirt poor and the next minute he was hanging with the likes of New York’s power elite. Jean-Michel was quoted as once saying, “I start a picture and I finish it. I don’t think about art while I work. I try to think about life.” Around the time of Basquiat’s death, some critics blamed Warhol for using Basquiat, transforming him into his pet-project and therefore skyrocketing him to fame and aiding in his ultimate death. Warhol responded, “I don’t think of myself of evil—just realistic…When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes the die before they get around to it…” [17] Had Basquiat lived longer he might’ve fully matured into the genius he was on his way to becoming, accepted his bright future, and gone on to inspire future artists for generations to come. Luckily, through the brilliant works he left behind—solo and collaborative, Basquiat continues to do just that.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ky1338cym91qzimo1o1_400.jpg)
{I just found this on my hard drive: if you like art, maybe you’ll like it. Or you’ll know a lot about art and think I’m fucking retarded. Whatever. Andy and Jean-Michel Basquiat RULE.
Two Most Wanted Men:
Andy Warhol and his Influence on Jean-Michel Basquiat
In the early 1960’s, America found itself immersed in a world of consumerism. The generations following World War II called for newer, better, machine-oriented products to make everyday life more convenient. In 1963, Andy Warhol opened The Factory at East 47th street in New York City producing repetitious images of Coca-Cola bottles, Brillo Pads, and Campbell’s Soup, de-symbolizing the same products that fueled America’s obsession with the massed-produced. “I want to be a machine,”[1] proclaimed Warhol. Always the wittier, Warhol’s comment wasn’t too far from the common consensus of the nuclear family, sitting cozily within their homes watching Oscar Meyer commercials on their television sets. Much like the famous images and people represented in their body of works, both Andy Warhol and his student/friend/protégé, Jean-Michel Basquiat grew to become the synonymous icons for the genre of Pop Art. Laurence Alloway, the critic responsible for first coining the term, claims, “Pop art is neither abstract nor realistic, though it has contacts in both directions. The core of Pop art is at neither frontier; it is, essentially, an art about signs and sign systems.”[2] Together and on their own Warhol and Basquiat served as the communicators of an intrinsic artistic language, identifiable in the streets and around the world, using images, words, and symbols to deliver their message of creativity, anti-consumerism, and their take on our material-based culture.
In the early sixties Andy Warhol broke out on the American Pop movement creating, painting, illustrating, filmmaking, and even dabbling in advertising. His works revolved around the similar themes and imagery as his Pop predecessors, Roy Lichtenstein and Richard Hamilton—using comic books, cartoon characters such as Popeye. Alloway further notes, “Pop art deals with material that already exists as signs: photographs, brand goods, comics—that is to say, with pre-coded material. The subject matter of Pop art, at one level, is known to the spectator in advance of seeing the use the artist makes of it.”[3] Marco Livingston, author of Pop Art: An International Perspective argues, “Unlike satire, which confronts its targets from a superior position, Pop Art appears as a subversive force emanating from within the very consumerist myths and representations that it calls into question.”
In following years Warhol began to focus his artwork on a process known as silk-screen, immortalizing recognizable iconic female figures such as Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.
“The work by which Warhol prefers to be known dates from his use of the silk screen in 1962. Here he selects a photographic image, transfers in enlarged to a silk screen, which can then be put down on the canvas and inked from the back. His subjects—women like Marilyn Monroe, Liz Taylor, and Jackie Kennedy—represent topical climaxes of glamour and also of suffering. The torments of celebrities take place, at least in part, in public, and Warhol is a master of the goldfish bowl effect that modern communication has produced.”
Through these repetitious works of art, particularly 25 Colored Marilyns, Andy hoped to de-symbolize and demystify these internationally famous American products and celebrities, while recognizing their star status. “His most famous portrait series, that of Marilyn Monroe…is as much about the pathos of celebrity identification as about celebration of the star…in his reduction of the fine-grained color of the Monroe photograph to a one-dimensional monochrome, the imaginary life is drawn out of it.”[6] He believed that once we grew accustomed to seeing these images over and over, which we as Americans are already used to, the idea of what they represent would simply fade away. Alloway writes: “Warhol uses the ready-made, such as photography from the public domain, to saturate his art with life’s traces. The texture of visual and social reality that photographs convey is an essential part of his art.”
After his Marilyn series, Warhol began mass-producing images of Brillo Pads, Campbell’s Soup cans, and Coca-Cola bottles. Rather than allude to our obsession with American products, Warhol solidifies his claim. These repetitious silk-screens and images of him sitting with his beloved Brillo Pad boxes are what Warhol is most famous for.
In 1982 Andy Warhol befriended legendary New York street graffiti Artist Jean Michel Basquiat. For years the Puerto-Rican born Basquiat bummed around the areas of New York City’s SOHO district, making ends meet, painting during all hours of the night, and scrawling his famous SAMO pseudonym (a code for Same Old Shit) and crown wherever it might be best seen. Leonhard Emmerling, author of Basquiat writes:
“Looking past his childlike means of depicting the big city and to the actual image of human beings in his work, Basquiat’s work is clearly an art of rage and rebellion. But it always retains, if in reduced form, the cunning word games from his graffiti period to the later paintings and drawings.
By this time, Basquiat was already heavy into using intravenous drugs, experimenting with cocaine and black-tar heroin. On a steady diet of drugs, coffee, meager sustenance and many cigarettes, Basquiat invigorated his already wild style, combining chalk, graffiti art expressionism, and a distinct use of symbolism and repetitious images; which is particularly attributed to the influence of early Warhol. “Of course, what he painted was repetitive; he constantly reprised earlier inventions, especially those that sold well on the art market and that had advanced to trademarks.”[8] Basquiat wore a crown in the New York art scene; a drawing that later became his signature image. Although Basquiat was not as kitschy as his older counterpart, he did draw many of his influences from the impact of Pop art. “Pop art is a part of a wider predisposition toward the reintroduction of imagery and the use of quotes sources among the generation of artists that followed abstract expressionism.”[9] Basquiat clearly already had his own particular style; Warhol simply provided a much wider outlet for his expressive angry artwork. Once they had made each other’s acquaintance, the two quickly began painting, eating, and spending much of their days attached at the hip. Basquiat was Warhol’s protégé—another project he could sink his Pop teeth into.
“It seemed like a perfect match, the beginning of a success story for the long term. Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, the most famous white artist and the most famous black artist, both equally at home in the art scene…both profiteering off each other: the one gaining a protégé who was a genius, the other gaining a patron and father figure of worldwide renown.”[10]
Soon Warhol and Basquiat were officially collaborating, backed by art dealers Tony Shafrazi and Bruno Bischofberger (who actually convinced Basquiat to work with Warhol), holding gallery showings of their collaborative effort at a Mercer Street Gallery in SoHo, New York. Both artists, and specifically, the decoder messages hidden between the incoherent all-over words of Basquiat, used repetitious images and symbols serving as active tongue-in-cheek comments on postwar American popular culture and human obsession with materials of the mass-produced. In the Warhol/Basquiat collaboration titled Bananas, 1984, these two men combine both their methods of communicating a comment, an idea, and most often, a message. Warhol’s famous banana (later made internationally recognized by Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground when Warhol produced and designed their “NICO” album) is located at the top of the piece, pealed and whole. Below it is the General Electric emblem, turned upside down. Quoted on his usage of symbols and logos, “Warhol said: ‘I adore America and these are some comments on it. My image is a statement of the symbols of the harsh, impersonal products and brash materialistic objects on which America is built today. It is a projection of everything that can be bought and sold, the practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us.’”[11] Lawrence Alloway further wrote, “No one painting can exhaust an image’s meaning; each painting is a part of a group that extends into the world beyond its edges. It is this sustained flow of images that acts as a metaphor, though not as the fact, of mass production.”
In 1963 Andy Warhol took out art-space on the fifth floor of 231 East 47th Street in Manhattan. This creative space controlled by Warhol was what soon became known as The Factory—New York socialite elites and artists alike could hang out and watch the creative process of Warhol. Some years later, he co-optioned a later locale with Basquiat, also dubbed The Factory. The name for the artistic space/party hangout was no coincidence. “[Most of the images produced in The Factory] divided along the line of either referential or as simulacral (a simulacrum is a copy without an apparent original, and in his image repetitions the original often does appear to dissolve.”[13] The purpose of this, according to Roland Barthes, author of “That Old Thing Art” was, “to release the image from deep meaning into sumlacral surface.”[14] Warhol also used this technique of repetition in his work White Burning Car III in 1963. Warhol had most of his works made by other people in his studio, reproducing the image from the original; The Factory proved to be the perfect name for his art space.
Through such works as Lavender Disaster, 1963, and White Burning Car III, 1963, Warhol sought to lend his efforts to express “the reality of suffering and death”[15] by hitting his audience over the head with brutal images of the aforementioned. Responding to the question “When did you start with the ‘Death’ series?” Warhol proclaimed, “I guess it was the big plane crash picture, the front page of a newspaper: 129 DIE. I was also painting the Marilyns. I realized that everything I was doing must have been about Death…But when you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect…”
The biggest impact Andy Warhol had on Jean-Michel Basquiat was his use of the ready-made object. Warhol drew on objects such as refrigerator doors, and often used found photography, such as the images of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy. As stated above, Basquiat began his career by spray-painting his famous SAMO graffiti tag around the lower parts of Manhattan. Before even meeting Andy Warhol, Basquiat was using found objects to paint and draw on because he couldn’t afford canvas and fancy paint. Unlike Warhol, who primarily used mass-produced objects and advertisements in his works, Basquiat used much more street-found objects. Basquiat would get his artistic hands on anything he could: benches, walls, restaurant placards, and wooden boxes. Any flat surface served as a canvas in the eyes of Basquiat. In a famous scene in the Miramax movie Basquiat, the actor portraying the famous artists takes soy sauce and chopsticks and makes it into a small work of found object, making a complete mess at the upscale restaurant, Mr. Chow. It perfectly depicts Basquiat’s use of anything and everything, a trick that truly amused Warhol and their contemporaries.
Unfortunately, at the young age of 27, Jean-Michel Basquiat died of a heroin overdose. His rise to overnight stardom, much with the help of his mentor Andy Warhol, was too much for him to handle. One minute he was dirt poor and the next minute he was hanging with the likes of New York’s power elite. Jean-Michel was quoted as once saying, “I start a picture and I finish it. I don’t think about art while I work. I try to think about life.” Around the time of Basquiat’s death, some critics blamed Warhol for using Basquiat, transforming him into his pet-project and therefore skyrocketing him to fame and aiding in his ultimate death. Warhol responded, “I don’t think of myself of evil—just realistic…When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes the die before they get around to it…” [17] Had Basquiat lived longer he might’ve fully matured into the genius he was on his way to becoming, accepted his bright future, and gone on to inspire future artists for generations to come. Luckily, through the brilliant works he left behind—solo and collaborative, Basquiat continues to do just that.
