Art is divine

“Basquiat x Warhol, à quatre mains”, the most important exhibition ever devoted to this singular work, brings together more than three hundred works and documents, including eighty canvases signed jointly. Individual works by each artist, as well as a group of works by Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Kenny Scharf, Michael Halsband... are also presented in order to restore the artistic scene of downtown New York in the 1980s.

From 1984 to 1985, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) and Andy Warhol (1928-1987) produced around 160 canvases together, “four hands”. Keith Haring (1958-1990) speaks about this subject of a pictorial conversation and the fusion of two creative minds to create a third with its own mode of expression completely separate from the other two entities.

Basquiat admired Warhol as his senior. He saw this publicized character having an original relationship to popular culture. As for Warhol, he rediscovered painting with this talented young man and it was with him that he resumed painting on a large scale.

Their complicity and their joint energy lead them to collaborate at a frenetic pace for exchanges full of strength and enthusiasm. Basquiat said that it was Warhol who started a painting with the drawing of a logo of a brand that he himself hastened to disfigure before asking him to come back to paint again. Warhol likes to melt into this confusion of expressions and loves the idea that we no longer know who had done what.

The exhibition shows these comings and goings in a veritable dialogue of styles and forms. These works deal with crucial subjects such as the insertion of the African-American community into the North American narrative, this continent of which Warhol was one of the great icon makers.

A collaboration in black and white punchline mode.