Andy: We’re very different…You’re all spontaneous and wild and so deep and mystical… and I’m still a commercial illustrator really, a photographer, obsessed with the surface of things.

I recently enjoyed ‘The Collaboration’, a play by Anthony McCarten that explores the period in the mid-1980s when artists Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat worked together.

We open in a New York gallery. Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger is expressing to Warhol his concern that the output of the celebrated master of Pop Art is becoming rather familiar.

Bruno: I mean all the brand names, the icons, reinterpreting things we see or use everyday. Everything silkscreened. As great as they are, they’re expected from you now. Forgive me, but when was the last time you picked up a brush and actually painted?

The ageing Warhol has not been focusing on his work. Rather he has been hanging out at Studio 54, partying with aristocrats, models, actors and rock stars. Bischofberger proposes a collaboration with hot young talent, Basquiat.

Bruno: It might be good for you, Andy. You can learn a lot from the young.

In the next scene Bischofberger puts the idea of a collaboration to a sceptical Basquiat.

Bruno: This could be incredible for you, Jean. Your name linked, as equals, with the most famous living painter in the world.

Jean: Is he living?

At length Warhol and Basquiat are persuaded. They begin work together, hesitantly at first.

Warhol is cool, cautious and considered. Basquiat is daring, instinctive, fluid. Warhol sets up his tracing projector machine and sketches the outline of the General Electric logo. Basquiat adds bold blocks of colour, enigmatic scrawls and a smiling figure with its arms in the air.

As they apply themselves to the task, they discuss their differing views of art.

Warhol explains his fascination with commerce.

Andy: One of the things I hope history will remember me for, if there’s any justice, is that I’ve broken down the walls between business and art. Business is art, it’s the best art. And art has always been business. It’s all commerce now.

Warhol also rebuts the criticism that his work lacks passion.

Andy: I am commentating. In a neutral way. No one ever gets this, but I’m trying to make art that forces you to ignore it…the same way we’re ignoring life.

Basquiat, by contrast, believes that the best art has mystical properties.

Jean: Paintings can have supernatural power if you imbue them with them. These symbols, these images. Wherever they come from, they have a power. They’re like… incantations.

He suggests that art should have meaning and purpose.

Jean: Art should disturb the comfortable…comfort the disturbed.

Inevitably, with such contrasting opinions on their craft, there are occasional flashpoints.

Andy: I make beautiful things. Carefully. Very carefully. I produce out of what I see.

Jean: ‘Produce’? You re-produce.

Nonetheless the Odd Couple work well together. Despite their differences, or perhaps because of them, they gain energy and inspiration from each other. They revel in the exchange of ideas and approaches. They enjoy the challenge.

Eventually Warhol picks up his brush again and paints.

Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled (General Electric II)
acrylic, oil pastel and silkscreen ink on canvas

Looking back on this collaboration that took place nearly 40 years ago, one can’t help but be struck by the chasm in age, career stage, style and perspective. Warhol was world famous, but stuck in a rut. Basquiat was in the ascendant, but with a lot to learn. Warhol was concerned with brands, media and fame; with surface and repetition. His work was aloof and distant. Basquiat’s art was populated by skeletons and skulls, masks and symbols. It was vibrant, dreamlike and magical.

Jean: Don’t you need a new challenge? You can’t just screenprint your life away.

Perhaps in the world of commercial creativity we should spend more time plotting irregular collaborations. Successful team alchemy is not just a matter of putting together like-minded soul mates. It is achieved by combining diverse skillsets, temperaments and outlooks; by creating the conditions for provocation and exchange, discovery and inspiration.

By the end of the play Warhol and Basquiat have produced enough paintings together to fill the Tony Shafrazi Gallery. Bischofberger is satisfied. It’s time to move on.

Andy: I think we’re done. Don’t you? Let’s just say we are. That’s the great thing about contemporary art – who can fucken tell?

'We came the long way,
And I thought you knew,
It was the long way.
My darling, I thought you knew.
We came the long way.
So don't break my heart.

We been through the desert
Where no water flows.
We've walked streets and highways
Where kung fu is afraid to go.
It was the long way.’

Junior Byles, ‘It Was a Long Way’ (W Boswell / J Byles)

No. 363

The artist in 1983 at his studio on Crosby Street.Roland Hagenberg

‘I don't think about art when I'm working. I try to think about life.’
Jean-Michel Basquiat

In 1967 a seven-year-old Brooklyn kid was playing stickball in the street when he was hit by a car. Confined to hospital to recover from his injuries, his mother gave him a copy of the textbook ‘Gray’s Anatomy’ to amuse him.

Years later when Jean-Michel Basquiat was an artist, the imagery that he had absorbed from that book repeatedly made its way onto his canvases - as skulls, spines and skeletons; as cross-sections, labels and anatomical diagrams. Basquiat had a special skill for translating his personal experiences into his work.

‘I never went to an art school. I failed at the art courses I did take at school. I just looked at a lot of things, and that’s where I think I learned about art.’

Basquiat, whose parents were Haitian and Puerto Rican, grew up with an instinctive love of art. As a child his mother took him to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and as a teenager he regularly visited galleries with his mates.

After leaving school at 17, Basquiat joined the vibrant post-punk creative scene that congregated around the run-down streets of lower Manhattan. With a friend he began spraying surreal, witty, provocative graffiti-poetry, under the SAMO© tag, all over SoHo and the Lower East Side. With another friend he created collage-based post cards and sold them on the street for a dollar or two. (His customers included his hero Andy Warhol.) He formed a band named Gray after the book that had made such an impression on him as a kid. He DJed at clubs and parties; acted in an art-house movie; hung out with members of the burgeoning hip-hop scene. And when eventually he turned to painting, he sold his first picture to the musician Debbie Harry.

Basquiat was an artistic autodidact. He saw no boundaries between media and he thrived within a networked creative community.

Basquiat was also a sponge for knowledge, inspiration and stimulus. His paintings are filled with references to his love of music (from bebop to hip hop); to his passion for sport (Sugar Ray Robinson, Floyd Patterson, Joe Louis); to the art history books he read (Da Vinci, Titian, Manet, Picasso, Duchamp); to his interest in the African American experience. All these elements are mixed in with the planes, automobiles and skyscrapers of his native city; with birds, masks and demons; with crowns, hats and halos; with icons of popular culture; with the enigmatic political poetry that he had first expressed in his graffiti.

‘I’m usually in front of the television. I have to have some source material around me to work off.’

There’s some fascinating film footage of Basquiat in 1985 sketching and making notes in front of the telly. He was clearly processing the material from one medium directly onto another; allowing himself to respond freely and intuitively, loosely and spontaneously. Across his work there are references to the cartoons, sci-fi shows and movies he had been watching – to Popeye and Felix the Cat; to ‘Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea’ and ‘Apocalypse Now.’

‘It’s sort of on automatic most of the time.’

Basquiat was special. He synthesized low and high culture; words, images and symbols; personal memories and public knowledge; the present and the past. He orchestrated his responses to the world, channeled and filtered them into one compelling, magical brew. And he seems to have captured something about what it is to live in these super-fast, over-choiced, hyper-connected, ethically-conflicted times.

Sadly in 1988 Basquiat died from a heroin overdose. He was 27.

So often the marketing and communications business is insular, introverted, isolated. For inspiration we consider adjacent markets, sectors, campaigns and brands; we examine our competitors and Cannes winners, popular ads and award books. But we rarely look beyond our own orbit.

Basquiat teaches us some simple lessons: that true creativity knows no boundaries; that it thrives within a Bohemian culture; that it needs constant stimulus, provocation and experience to sustain it; that if we want to make interesting work, we should seek catalysts from beyond our immediate environment.

You need input if you’re going to create output.

‘Basquiat: Boom for Real’ is at the Barbican in London until 28 January 2018.

No. 164

The Odd Couple: What Warhol and Basquiat Teach Us About Collaboration

Basquiat Watching Telly: You Need Input If You’re Going To Create Output