Tony Shafrazi Gallery

Tony Shafrazi Gallery was a recurring destination in Andy Warhol’s diaries and a stage for the changing relations between downtown art, celebrity, and the art market. Warhol visited its exhibitions, watched artists’ reputations and prices rise, and eventually showed collaborative paintings there with Jean-Michel Basquiat. The gallery’s significance in these entries is not only that it displayed work: it made visible Warhol’s mixed feelings about recognition, competition, and the short-lived promise of a show.

A recurring exhibition space

In January 1984, Warhol went to the closing of a Keith Haring exhibition at the gallery’s Disco annex. He paid $8 for the cab and $95 for memorabilia and posters, but the visit stirred more than a collector’s interest. Seeing what people were doing made him jealous and recalled a time when he had felt himself to be on top of the art world. The closing thus registered as a personal comparison between Haring’s current visibility and Warhol’s own remembered standing.

The gallery also figured in Warhol’s awareness of institutional recognition. He believed that Tony Shafrazi’s defacement of Picasso’s Guernica explained why none of the artists represented by the gallery had entered the Museum of Modern Art. He immediately complicated that explanation: Keith Haring was not represented there either, while the museum held only one of Warhol’s works, a small Marilyn. The complaint places the gallery within a larger question about who enters a museum and whose work remains outside, while exposing Warhol’s own irritation at the limited presence of his art.

Artists, prices, and competition

A visit in December 1984 to Kenny Scharf’s exhibition brought the gallery’s commercial distinctions into sharper focus. Warhol noted that Scharf’s paintings were selling for $30,000 and that Haring, who was also represented by the gallery, felt uneasy about the contrast. Haring preferred not to let his prices climb too high; Warhol listed them at $8,000, $10,000, and $15,000. The comparison shows that the gallery’s artists were not simply grouped together by affiliation: their different price levels could become a source of discomfort even among peers.

The gallery’s exhibitions also gathered artists and audiences from across the downtown scene. When Basquiat came to work with Warhol in January 1985, he brought his mother; later that month Warhol encountered Ronnie Cutrone and Tama Janowitz at Shafrazi’s. By September, the gallery was preparing to show paintings made by Warhol and Basquiat together. Warhol anticipated that Basquiat might pick a fight with him before the opening, an apprehension that made the exhibition’s professional importance inseparable from the strain he expected in their personal and working relationship.

The Warhol–Basquiat exhibition

The collaborative exhibition opened on September 14, 1985. Warhol picked up Basquiat and went with him to the gallery, where the rooms were so crowded that a Danceteria doorman controlled entry, walking visitors in and out. Gerard Malanga asked Warhol for an autograph; Taylor Mead and René Ricard were also there. Warhol thought the paintings looked very good and reported that people seemed to like them. The crowded opening offered a public affirmation of the collaboration, even as its presentation depended on the familiar rituals of access, celebrity, and social circulation.

Warhol’s account also records how the show’s reception was uneven. He wore a Stefano jacket bearing a painted image of Basquiat, but decided afterward that he could not wear such unusual clothes without looking like a weirdo and would stick to basic black. A month later, artist Bill Katz praised the exhibition, yet Warhol felt Basquiat was getting the good press rather than him. He thought the works, priced at $40,000 or $50,000, had not sold well and that the timing was too early. He was still holding on to his Piss paintings. The gallery had provided a conspicuous platform, but a crowded opening and favorable comments did not guarantee sales or equal recognition for the collaborators.

After the show

By February 1986, Warhol was connecting the exhibition to a wider downturn in prices. Fred Hughes told him that the Hammer & Sickles had gone low; Warhol said his prices had been high until the de Menil auction brought them down. He also considered Shafrazi’s show bad for everyone, adding that it might have been better if it had been held that year rather than earlier. In retrospect, the exhibition appeared to have consumed material and opportunity: Warhol reflected that after a show, it was over and the artists had used up what they had to present. His recollection turns the gallery from a site of opening-night excitement into a marker of the art market’s reversals and of how quickly a show’s promise could expire.

The gallery continued to serve as a meeting point for art and celebrity. In December 1986, Warhol attended Dennis Hopper’s photography exhibition there with Paige Powell and encountered Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf. He judged the photographs unremarkable and suspected that Shafrazi had wanted publicity through a movie star. Visitors, meanwhile, praised Hopper’s performance in Blue Velvet, and Warhol tried unsuccessfully to recruit him for a television program before Hopper left town. At a dinner for Hopper, Keith later complained that Julian Schnabel had delivered a speech about the actor despite not knowing him. These episodes show the gallery’s recurring double register: it presented art, but its events also operated through celebrity, conversation, and publicity. In Warhol’s diary, that mixture is neither an uncomplicated success nor a dismissal; it is the setting in which artistic ambition met reputation, market value, and the crowded business of being seen.