Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat moves through Andy Warhol’s diary as both a startling artistic force and a difficult, increasingly distant companion. First remembered as a young painter selling T-shirts in Greenwich Village, he becomes a celebrated artist whose work commands thousands of dollars, collaborates with Warhol on paintings, and draws the attention of galleries and collectors. The diary follows that ascent without smoothing its contradictions: inventive work and drug use, intimacy and uncertainty, early generosity and later market pressure all remain in view.

Early encounters and changing fortunes

Warhol’s recollection begins before Basquiat’s success. When Bruno Bischofberger brought him to meet Warhol, Basquiat was identified with the street name SAMO and with paintings on T-shirts made on the sidewalk in Greenwich Village. Warhol recalled giving him ten dollars now and then and sending him to Serendipity to try to sell the shirts. He described Basquiat as a middle-class Brooklyn kid who had attended college but was trying to make his way as a painter in the Village. In the same account, Warhol registered the uncertainty surrounding how others described Basquiat’s identity, a detail that shows the diary recording both its subject and the limits of the narrator’s knowledge.

The earlier transactions returned to mind after Basquiat’s career had advanced. He reached into his pocket and offered to repay the forty dollars he had borrowed in those days. Warhol waved away the repayment, then admitted to being surprised: he had imagined he must have given Basquiat more. The small debt became a measure of the distance between the casual assistance of the sidewalk period and the new scale of Basquiat’s fortunes, while their ability to remember that earlier exchange kept the past present between them.

Basquiat also appeared in the orbit of Warhol’s work and social life. Warhol invited him to lunch, then sat for Julian Schnabel for two hours, removing a Paramount T-shirt at Schnabel’s request and taking off his glasses so he could look at the painter while maintaining his deliberately distant expression. On another occasion Warhol photographed Basquiat in a jockstrap. These entries place Basquiat not only among artists and gallery connections but within the intimate, image-making routine of Warhol’s office.

Recognition, money, and the art market

As Basquiat’s reputation accelerated, Warhol watched the change with excitement and unease. Basquiat told him a story about a drawing made to earn seventy-five cents for cigarettes: a week later, the gallery had called to ask whether it should buy the drawing for a thousand dollars. He found the reversal funny. Now, with paintings said to fetch fifteen thousand dollars, he was on his way upstairs to see whether anyone would pay two dollars for one. The joke depended on the gap between the original, everyday purpose of making a drawing and the price assigned to it once the art market recognized the artist.

The figures kept rising. Warhol later noted that a Basquiat painting had sold for twenty thousand dollars at Christie’s and predicted that he would become the “Big Black Painter.” Yet the prediction was accompanied by concern that success might narrow the work. Warhol thought the early paintings were better because Basquiat had simply been painting, whereas now he had to think of things to paint in order to sell. He also advised him to keep and store early work rather than let Bruno buy everything and resell it gradually, imagining those retained paintings as a nest egg. His attention moved between the excitement of recognition, practical worries about Basquiat’s finances, and skepticism about art made under pressure to satisfy a market.

Basquiat’s ascent also changed his daily circumstances. Warhol remarked that he had given up a room at the Ritz-Carlton and stopped taking limousines, which he regarded as an improvement, even as he noted a costly Mexican mask bought for Halloween and Basquiat’s tendency to spend money. The diary thus records success not as a single public breakthrough but as a changing combination of prices, possessions, living arrangements, and expectations.

Addiction and troubled intimacy

The rise in visibility did not reassure everyone close to Basquiat. Paige, who was involved with him and had helped arrange a major uptown show, cried to Warhol because Basquiat was deeply involved with heroin and she wanted him to intervene. Warhol described a hole in Basquiat’s nose and his inability to use cocaine, then speculated that he wanted to remain on a drug of some kind. His response was helplessness: Paige was asking him to do something, but he did not know what he could do. The episode places Basquiat’s drug use beside the professional support that helped bring him into Warhol’s office and into public view.

Warhol’s later entries continue to note the strain. Basquiat called several times while taking heroin. At the office he arrived drugged and excited with a painting; on another visit he fell asleep on the floor, looking to Warhol like a down-and-out man. Warhol woke him, and Basquiat produced two paintings he called masterpieces. That sharp change—from collapse to impressive work—does not resolve the danger the diary records. It shows how artistic ability and visible impairment could occupy the same scene without one erasing the other.

Their closeness was not consistently tender or easy. When Basquiat said he would meet Warhol and the others at the airport before a trip to Milan, he failed to appear. Warhol later slapped him in the face, hard enough to shake him, and said he had abandoned them in Milan; Benjamin had prompted the gesture. The diary preserves the incident with laughter but also with the force of the slap and Basquiat’s reaction, turning a missed meeting into an intimate reprimand rather than a mere scheduling mishap.

At other times, Basquiat’s personal life appeared through fragments that Warhol could not fully explain. A woman he had taken around the world and left in London arrived in New York seeking a ticket back to California. Later, Warhol heard that Basquiat had locked his bedroom door when he left so Shenge could not enter and had left him no money. Basquiat had not called Warhol in a month after traveling to Hawaii and Japan and then staying in Los Angeles. Warhol wondered whether he was becoming tight with money, but stated this as a guess, not a certainty. The silence and the reports of strained domestic arrangements leave the relationship at a distance: Warhol could observe absences and hear accounts, but could not claim access to Basquiat’s private motives.

Collaboration and creative tension

Basquiat and Warhol’s work together became a recurring source of excitement and insecurity. They once painted an African masterpiece together, one hundred feet long; Warhol judged Basquiat the better painter. Later he anticipated that Basquiat might come in and demand that they rip up their shared paintings because he hated them. The imagined destruction was not presented as something Basquiat had actually done. It expressed Warhol’s anxiety about the collaboration’s future and about whether the work would survive Basquiat’s changing judgment.

Their working arrangement could be informal and physically immediate. Basquiat came to the office to paint, sometimes arriving exhausted enough to fall asleep before beginning. On another day, after waking, he made two paintings Warhol admired. Warhol also described Basquiat having Jay fill in paintings and trying to hire Jay away from him; Jay declined. Basquiat wanted to finish work before leaving again, while both artists made use of assistance with filling in paintings. These details show collaboration embedded in the practical routines of the studio, with shared work and competing claims on staff alongside the act of painting itself.

The relationship moved through periods of absence and renewed enthusiasm. When Basquiat complained about their show with Bruno, Warhol wondered whether the period of Basquiat coming upstairs to paint was over: he had visited the new building only a few times and seemed buoyed by a downtown show, while Warhol was unsure whether he was working. Later, after picking him up, Warhol found him working again and called the work wonderful and exciting, adding that he thought Basquiat would last. The judgments shift from uncertainty about whether the collaboration had ended to renewed confidence in the artist’s durability.

The public presentation of their collaboration could feel different from the private one. Before the opening of their joint paintings at Shafrazi Gallery, Warhol was holding his breath for a major fight Basquiat might pick with him. At dinner he then saw a headline in The New York Times announcing “Basquiat and Warhol in Pas de Deux,” followed by a line calling Basquiat Warhol’s “mascot.” Warhol’s horrified reaction reveals the sting of a label that reduced a working partnership to a subordinate role, just as their joint exhibition was about to be seen publicly. The headline made the collaboration legible to readers but imposed a hierarchy that Warhol found uncomfortable.

A wider circle and an unsettled ending

Basquiat’s social world expanded beyond Warhol’s office. Warhol described him as the new darling of Bruno’s circle while he was traveling in Spain, Ibiza, and Majorca. At the opening of Basquiat’s Mary Boone Gallery show, Warhol found him very nervous and saw him holding hands with a young woman who worked as Larry Gagosian’s secretary in Los Angeles. Warhol predicted that Basquiat would break her heart, but this was his judgment of the scene, not a reported outcome. The entry shows how Warhol watched Basquiat attract admiration while remaining alert to the instability he associated with his relationships.

Warhol could also be generous in his attention to Basquiat apart from work. At Basquiat’s birthday lunch at Mortimer’s, he gave him a six-album rhythm-and-blues set released by Atlantic. Basquiat liked the gift and spent the lunch reading its liner notes. Warhol pointed out that Ahmet Ertegun had written some of the songs during his major years. The scene offers a quieter counterpoint to gallery prices, drug use, and arguments: a carefully chosen musical gift held Basquiat’s attention through lunch.

The diary does not settle into a final account of either Basquiat’s art or his bond with Warhol. It records Warhol’s fear that their joint paintings might be rejected, periods when Basquiat stopped coming by or calling, renewed visits and admired work, and a public collaboration vulnerable to being described as a “Pas de Deux” with a “mascot.” Basquiat remains, in these entries, at once the young painter Warhol once tried to help, the artist whose work could command tens of thousands of dollars, and a collaborator whose brilliance did not make their connection predictable. That unresolved movement is the point of the portrait: success changed the terms of their acquaintance without making either the work or the relationship easy to read.