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Lot Essay
A radiant icon topped with Jean-Michel Basquiat’s signature ‘crown of thorns’, Portrait of Keith Haring is a poignant tribute to one of the twentieth century’s great artistic relationships. Standing among the few direct portraits that Basquiat made of his friend and comrade—and, indeed, a rare instance of a named living subject in his oeuvre—it bears witness to the vital, creative camaraderie that flourished between two titans of the 1980s New York art scene. With the bold, graphic economy of an artist at the height of his powers, Basquiat seals Haring’s likeness in regal profile: teeth bared and eyes wide, his face is streaked with luminous gestures of red, blue and orange oilstick. His crown of thorns crackles like an electricity circuit: where Basquiat had made use of the structure to conjure ideas of sovereignty and martyrdom, here it takes on new dimensions, evocative of the glowing, radial lines with which Haring would encircle his own iconographic motifs. It is a powerful reminder of the friendship that would drive both artists to greater heights, and which would be brought to a tragic close by their untimely deaths just several years later. The work was acquired by the original owner from Now Gallery—a pioneering centre for urban art in New York—where it is believed to have been shown in one or more artistic gatherings during this period.
Haring first met Basquiat during his time at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he had enrolled in 1978. At the time, Basquiat was still operating under his graffitist’s pseudonym ‘SAMO©’, and Haring was keenly aware of his work. ‘Before I knew who he was, I became obsessed with Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work’, he recalls. ‘… From the beginning he was my favourite artist’ (K. Haring, quoted in D. Sheff, ‘Keith Haring: Just Say Know’, Rolling Stone, 10 August 1989). His subversive, poetic tags, unlike anything else in downtown Manhattan, ‘opened up new vistas’ to the young artist (K. Haring, quoted in P. Donker Duyvis, ‘Every station is my gallery: interview with Keith Haring’, in Keith Haring, exh. cat. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1986, p. 45). Haring would eventually encounter him in person, initially by accident: ‘I let him into school without knowing who he was—because he was having troubles getting past a security guard at the front’, he recalls. ‘I walked him in, and then later on I saw all this graffiti and found out he was the one who had done it … some of his best stuff was in the School of Visual Arts’ (K. Haring, quoted in V. Aletti, ‘An Interview with Keith Haring, spring 1981’, in Keith Haring: Future Primeval, exh. cat. University Galleries, Illinois State University 1990, pp. 95-6).
Haring first paid homage to SAMO© in a work of 1979, and the two would begin to socialise at the Mudd Club and other venues associated with New York’s burgeoning hip-hop scene. In May 1980, Basquiat’s true identity now revealed, Haring included examples of his work in a group show that he organised at Club 57: a month later, the two would both achieve widespread recognition through their participation in Colab’s seminal Times Square Show in June. The following year, they would exhibit together again in Diego Cortez’s exhibition New York/New Wave. While the latter propelled Basquiat from the streets to the studio, Haring continued to operate as an urban artist, drawing on the city’s subway walls and spreading his art among the people. This particular distinction between their practices would become increasingly magnified over the years: where Basquiat’s cultural and political critiques were subtly embedded in his canvases, coded in cryptic fragments of poetry and filtered through a staggering range of source imagery, Haring would forge a more explicit social practice, actively campaigning for a fairer, brighter and more accepting world.
At the same time, their practices were tightly bound. Both rode the multi-media wave of music, dance and graffiti that pulsed its way through 1980s New York; both, equally, were deeply engaged with literature and art history, admiring the work of William Burroughs and plundering tropes from the Old Masters to contemporary advertising. They collaborated with each other, and with others, and both forged meaningful individual relationships with Pop veteran Andy Warhol. By the time of the present work, moreover, both were at the peak of their celebrity. 1984 saw Basquiat’s first solo museum exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, as well as his frenetic debut at Mary Boone’s New York Gallery, whose thronging crowds—presided over by Warhol himself—attested to his newfound ‘blue-chip status’ (J. Bretschneider, quoted in P. Hoban, Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, New York 1998, p. 236). Meanwhile, Haring’s legendary ‘Party of Life’ took place at Paradise Garage in SoHo that year, attended by the biggest names in art, music and fashion: its guests included Basquiat’s former girlfriend Madonna, who—dressed in a suit designed by Haring—gave an early performance of Like a Virgin.
The present work also attests to the vital importance of drawing within both artists’ practices. For Haring, it was a primal medium, connecting the hand and the brain through a kind of ancient, prehistoric magic. For Basquiat, it was similarly fundamental—as the curator Fred Hoffman explains, it allowed him to ‘shut out the myriad stimuli constantly bombarding him from the outside world; and at the same time, he could enable impressions, thoughts, memories, associations, fantasies, and observations formulating in his mind to simply pass through him, making their way onto a sheet of paper’ (F. Hoffman, Jean-Michel Basquiat Drawing, exh. cat. Acquavella Galleries, New York 2014, p. 33). Despite its stripped-back economy, the present work sparks multiple associations: from Renaissance profile portraits to the Cubist heads of Pablo Picasso, to the elegant diagrams that Basquiat devoured in his beloved childhood copy of Gray’s Anatomy. As in so many of the artist’s works—particularly those on paper—evidence of his studio environment quivers in ethereal traces in the background, alive with the raw intensity of his working process.
Both Haring and Basquiat died tragically young. Basquiat was just 27 when he passed away in 1988; Haring, who lost his battle with AIDS two years later, was 31. Yet—like Van Gogh and Gauguin, Bacon and Freud, Auerbach and Kossoff—their friendship lives on in the tributes they made to one another. Haring’s memorial work A Pile of Crowns for Jean-Michel Basquiat (1988) is particularly poignant in relation to the present work: the crown was Basquiat’s trademark motif, tinged with both jubilation at his own success and a lingering fear that, as he daubed on one of his canvases, ‘most young kings get their heads cut off’. Styled as a crown of thorns, it invoked near-messianic connotations, which resonate loudly across Basquiat’s oeuvre. Here, the symbol testifies both to the admiration that he felt for Haring, and a solidarity with his high-flying predicament. In his obituary for the artist, published in Vogue, Haring’s eulogy to his friend is hauntingly prophetic of his own fate. ‘The supreme poet’, he wrote. ‘Every action is symbolic, every gesture an event… Greedily we wonder what masterpieces we might have been cheated out of by his death … only now will people begin to understand the magnitude of his contribution’ (K. Haring, ‘Remembering Basquiat’, Vogue, November 1988, pp. 230, 234).
Haring first met Basquiat during his time at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he had enrolled in 1978. At the time, Basquiat was still operating under his graffitist’s pseudonym ‘SAMO©’, and Haring was keenly aware of his work. ‘Before I knew who he was, I became obsessed with Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work’, he recalls. ‘… From the beginning he was my favourite artist’ (K. Haring, quoted in D. Sheff, ‘Keith Haring: Just Say Know’, Rolling Stone, 10 August 1989). His subversive, poetic tags, unlike anything else in downtown Manhattan, ‘opened up new vistas’ to the young artist (K. Haring, quoted in P. Donker Duyvis, ‘Every station is my gallery: interview with Keith Haring’, in Keith Haring, exh. cat. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1986, p. 45). Haring would eventually encounter him in person, initially by accident: ‘I let him into school without knowing who he was—because he was having troubles getting past a security guard at the front’, he recalls. ‘I walked him in, and then later on I saw all this graffiti and found out he was the one who had done it … some of his best stuff was in the School of Visual Arts’ (K. Haring, quoted in V. Aletti, ‘An Interview with Keith Haring, spring 1981’, in Keith Haring: Future Primeval, exh. cat. University Galleries, Illinois State University 1990, pp. 95-6).
Haring first paid homage to SAMO© in a work of 1979, and the two would begin to socialise at the Mudd Club and other venues associated with New York’s burgeoning hip-hop scene. In May 1980, Basquiat’s true identity now revealed, Haring included examples of his work in a group show that he organised at Club 57: a month later, the two would both achieve widespread recognition through their participation in Colab’s seminal Times Square Show in June. The following year, they would exhibit together again in Diego Cortez’s exhibition New York/New Wave. While the latter propelled Basquiat from the streets to the studio, Haring continued to operate as an urban artist, drawing on the city’s subway walls and spreading his art among the people. This particular distinction between their practices would become increasingly magnified over the years: where Basquiat’s cultural and political critiques were subtly embedded in his canvases, coded in cryptic fragments of poetry and filtered through a staggering range of source imagery, Haring would forge a more explicit social practice, actively campaigning for a fairer, brighter and more accepting world.
At the same time, their practices were tightly bound. Both rode the multi-media wave of music, dance and graffiti that pulsed its way through 1980s New York; both, equally, were deeply engaged with literature and art history, admiring the work of William Burroughs and plundering tropes from the Old Masters to contemporary advertising. They collaborated with each other, and with others, and both forged meaningful individual relationships with Pop veteran Andy Warhol. By the time of the present work, moreover, both were at the peak of their celebrity. 1984 saw Basquiat’s first solo museum exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh, as well as his frenetic debut at Mary Boone’s New York Gallery, whose thronging crowds—presided over by Warhol himself—attested to his newfound ‘blue-chip status’ (J. Bretschneider, quoted in P. Hoban, Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, New York 1998, p. 236). Meanwhile, Haring’s legendary ‘Party of Life’ took place at Paradise Garage in SoHo that year, attended by the biggest names in art, music and fashion: its guests included Basquiat’s former girlfriend Madonna, who—dressed in a suit designed by Haring—gave an early performance of Like a Virgin.
The present work also attests to the vital importance of drawing within both artists’ practices. For Haring, it was a primal medium, connecting the hand and the brain through a kind of ancient, prehistoric magic. For Basquiat, it was similarly fundamental—as the curator Fred Hoffman explains, it allowed him to ‘shut out the myriad stimuli constantly bombarding him from the outside world; and at the same time, he could enable impressions, thoughts, memories, associations, fantasies, and observations formulating in his mind to simply pass through him, making their way onto a sheet of paper’ (F. Hoffman, Jean-Michel Basquiat Drawing, exh. cat. Acquavella Galleries, New York 2014, p. 33). Despite its stripped-back economy, the present work sparks multiple associations: from Renaissance profile portraits to the Cubist heads of Pablo Picasso, to the elegant diagrams that Basquiat devoured in his beloved childhood copy of Gray’s Anatomy. As in so many of the artist’s works—particularly those on paper—evidence of his studio environment quivers in ethereal traces in the background, alive with the raw intensity of his working process.
Both Haring and Basquiat died tragically young. Basquiat was just 27 when he passed away in 1988; Haring, who lost his battle with AIDS two years later, was 31. Yet—like Van Gogh and Gauguin, Bacon and Freud, Auerbach and Kossoff—their friendship lives on in the tributes they made to one another. Haring’s memorial work A Pile of Crowns for Jean-Michel Basquiat (1988) is particularly poignant in relation to the present work: the crown was Basquiat’s trademark motif, tinged with both jubilation at his own success and a lingering fear that, as he daubed on one of his canvases, ‘most young kings get their heads cut off’. Styled as a crown of thorns, it invoked near-messianic connotations, which resonate loudly across Basquiat’s oeuvre. Here, the symbol testifies both to the admiration that he felt for Haring, and a solidarity with his high-flying predicament. In his obituary for the artist, published in Vogue, Haring’s eulogy to his friend is hauntingly prophetic of his own fate. ‘The supreme poet’, he wrote. ‘Every action is symbolic, every gesture an event… Greedily we wonder what masterpieces we might have been cheated out of by his death … only now will people begin to understand the magnitude of his contribution’ (K. Haring, ‘Remembering Basquiat’, Vogue, November 1988, pp. 230, 234).