The Odd Couple

After a hit run in London, The Collaboration is putting Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat on Broadway. Costars (and fast friends) Paul Bettany and Jeremy Pope paint us a picture.

- Marley Marius

The posters framed it as a fight; a challenge between two heavyweights. At left was Andy Warhol, wearing shiny Everlast boxing gloves, shorts, a black turtleneck, and a vaguely haunted look on his face—he was, by then, a frail 56—his arms crossed like Tutankhamen’. At his side was Jean-Michel Basquiat, shirtless, impassive, and not yet 25, in the same gloves, shorts, and stance. In other imagery, their gloves are raised, or Warhol softly) lands a blow on Basquiat’s jaw. It was 1985, and paintings from a collaboration between the two artists—orchestrated by Swiss art dealer Bruno Bischofberger, who formally introduced them in 1982—were headed to Tony Shafrazi’s gallery on Mercer Street.

The critical response to their project was not warm. When, the year before, paintings that Warhol, Basquiat, and Italian artist Francesco Clemente worked on together were shown in Zurich, Artforum deemed them disappointing...Basquiat’s scribbles, Clemente’s sensuous figures and faces, and Warhol's silkscreen techniques all display visual brilliance, but rarely do they engage in any real dialogue”; and after the Shafrazi show opened in September, The New York Times called its 16 untitled canvases large, bright, messy, full of private jokes and inconclusive.” The insinuation, in the same review, that Basquiat had become a feckless art world mascot” proved especially hurtful; he broke ties with Warhol not long afterward.)