"WARHOL ON BASQUIAT" TELLS THE STORY OF THEIR UNLIKELY FRIENDSHIP IN ANDY'S WORDS & PHOTOS

Today is Jean Michel Basquiat’s birthday. His friendship and collaborations with Andy Warhol are the stuff of legend.

At a time when Warhol was already world famous and the elder statesman of New York cool, Basquiat was a downtown talent rising rapidly from the graffiti scene. Together, they forged personal and professional partnership.

The book, Warhol on Basquiat, explores the artists’ personal and professional relationship through hundreds of never-before-published photographs of Basquiat by Warhol, along with excerpts from the legendary Andy Warhol Diaries, and rarely seen archival material and examples of their collaborative artworks.

Jean Michel Basquiat would have been 60 today and Andy would have been 82.

Warhol on Basquiat, was produced in collaboration with The Andy Warhol Foundation and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s estate. From TASCHEN Books or on Amazon.

THIS EXHIBIT OF KEITH HARING & JEAN-MICHEL’S EARLY WORK IS MASSIVELY EXCITING!

The closure of museums, galleries, and venues across the globe has led to a surprising benefit; virtual exhibits.

The National Gallery of Victoria is closed but now you can view the their newly-launched virtual programming including the world premiere exhibition, Crossing Lines, showcasing the works of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

More than 200 artworks on display, showcasing Haring’s and Basquait’s early work in NYC subways, early collaborations, plus the creative social circles in which they later found themselves in. This is an exhibition not to be missed, really.

I was around at the time and knew these guys, and I saw lots of shows in the 80s as well as amazing retrospectives of each since but there is a LOT of work here I’ve never seen before. In addition to gallery after gallery of amazing, influential work, the hallways are filled with giant blow-ups and videos of Keith and Jean, along with friends and fellow artists, like Kenny Scharf and Andy Warhol.

There’s also a show within a show toward the end with a Polaroid portrait exhibit of 80s downtown scene by my pal, artist and designer, Maripol.

Audiences around the world can visually navigate their way through Crossing Lines by clicking here.

Keith & Debi Mazar (Collection of Trey Speegle, not included in this exhibit)

DIANNE BRILL GOES "TO THE FUTURE THROUGH THE PAST" WITH A PHOTO RETROSPECTIVE

Dianne Brill really WAS the Queen of the Night in NYC in the 80s, but no one ever resented that title, because she was nice. Not just gorgeous, funny, glamorous and fun, but a really nice person. Being an aloof bitch was NOT her schtick.

And so, she was photographed by everyone. Robert Mapplethorpe, Steven Klein, Mario Testino, Annie Leibovitz, Michel Comte, Bill King and ME.

We were not besties at the time, but we ran into each other two years ago at the other Queen of the Night, Susanne Bartsch‘s clothing retrospective at FIT and reconnected. We are Facebook pals and have hundreds of friends in common, which is no big surprise. She literally knows EVERYONE.

While she was organizing this exhibit, I told her I had a a fab pic I took of her and Keith Haring at the reopening of MoMA in 1984. It’s a pretty great shot, if I do say so myself. There’s another pic of Dianne & Keith watching my Polaroid image emerge but sadly, I couldn’t locate it in time for the exhibit. (It’ll turn up, Dianne, I promise!)

Her new exhibition, To the Future Through the Past, is now on view at PHOTO 18 in Zurich, through January 16, 2018 and features hundreds of images.

And La Brill shares her secrets here of how YOU can spin your social life into opportunities and more importantly, fun!

“I lived in Wisconsin, then Florida, and moved to London. I had some visa problems and wound up back in America. I was freaking out about what was going to happen and there I was in New York. The first six months were tough and then I started going out after that point. At that time, people were going out, smoking a cigarette, chilling out, posing against the wall and being unavailable. People were sick of that. Along came this girl (who was me) and I was thrilled about every person I met. If you have a natural curiosity about yourself and about others, that comes across.

I went into the club. I dressed up, I always made an effort to look a certain way, but my eyes were open wide because I was curious and excited about everyone I was meeting: artists, writers, musicians – all creative people. Some of them became famous. Some of them didn’t, but they were all fabulous. Our rents were $300 a month so we could do whatever we wanted. I had found my tribe.

Don’t get too drunk. I never got drunk or did drugs so I can remember everything (Laughs). I didn’t make too many mistakes because I wasn’t sloppy. You have to be able to handle yourself when you’re in a crowd. You have to be able to control yourself.

All those years with Andy and I never got him to sign anything. He would bring a pile of Interview magazines to the club, sign them, and give them out to everybody – then we would go on with our evening. I could have easily said, ‘Give me one,’ but something inside of me said ‘No.’ I didn’t want to take advantage of him. I never got one piece of anything and he would have done it for me but something said, ‘Don’t.’ I didn’t want to be one of those people.”

Knowing when to leave a party is very important. If you leave at the peak of the party, if you do this a lot, it starts to look like as soon as you leave, the party goes down and when you’re there, the party is up.”

Naomi Campbell, NYC, 1991, Personal photo, Dianne Brill

John Badum, Miami on NYE, 1992. Personal photo, Dianne Brill

Jerry Hall backstage at Mugler, Paris, 1995. Personal photo, Dianne Brill

Jerry Hall & Marie Helvin in Bain Douche, Paris, 1995. Personal photo, Dianne Brill

John Waters, NYFW, 1993

Space Bride on The Mugler runway, 1990. Photo, Marc Baptiste

Pony girl, The Roxy, NYC, 1988

MAOPR ad, 2002

Grace Jones, Paris, 1989. Personal photo, Dianne Brill

Andy Warhol, at AREA, NYC, 1985, Photo, Roxanne Lowitt

Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat at an Outlaw party in NYC 1986 in an abandoned subway station. “It was totally illegal and so fun. The party lasted 20 minutes before it was closed down.”

(via Dazed)

#RIP: ARTIST, RICHARD HAMBLETON

Richard Hambleton, the Canadian-born conceptual graffiti artist died last Sunday. Kristine Woodward, co-owner of the Woodward Gallery in Manhattan, which worked with him, said he died in a downtown Manhattan apartment with a female friend. She said she didn’t know the cause but he had skin cancer and the spinal conditions scoliosis and kyphosis.

I arrived in New York City in the summer of 1980 and so did Hambleton’s startling black-splattered silhouettes. The life-size, menacing figures lurked and leapt out exploding.

Photo, Hank O’Neal/ Storyville Films & Motto Pictures

Hambleton told People magazine in 1984. 

“I painted the town black. They could represent watchmen or danger or the shadows of a human body after a nuclear holocaust or even my own shadow.”

He was part of the downtown art scene with contemporaries like Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat at Club 57, a bar on St. Marks Place in the East Village that is the subject of a new exhibition at the MoMA. I was at the opening on Halloween night, and there was one of his works lurking again, just days after he passed. He made it to the Museum of Modern Art but didn’t live to see it.

Hambleton died two days before the Club 57 show opened this Halloween night at MoMA, featuring one of his shadowmen

He was success for a while in the early to mid 80s and had exhibits in Europe painting his shadow men on walls in Venice walls and even the Berlin Wall before it came down.

He battled addictions to drugs (mostly heroin) and was evicted from apartments and studios, forgotten then later rediscovered. 

Ms. Woodward, along with her husband John, showed Hambleton’s work, found him studios and places to stay and even and cooked for him. A trained nurse, she also attended to some of his medical needs. She said,

“He was so charismatic and so manipulative, but once you were in his sphere you couldn’t shake him. He had it. He didn’t care about the periphery. He would live in a bag on the street. All he wanted was paint supplies.”

Hambleton first came to public attention in the mid-70s by painting crime-scene outlines of bodies on pavement and adding “blood,” in order to create the sense that maybe a serial murderer was on the loose.

Performance artist and actress, Penny Arcade, says in Shadowman, a documentary about Mr. Hambleton, directed by Oren Jacoby, that has yet to be released. (clip below)

“I remember stumbling on one of them and thinking it was a real crime scene… this may be something else, but I didn’t have any language for it.”

Hambleton says in the documentary,

“I began to think I was murdering people, going back to my hotel covered in paint, blood, blood-red paint… blood has a beautiful color.

Hambleton in his 80s heyday. Photo, Ben Buchanan

Reviewing an exhibition of Hambleton’s paintings at the Piezo Electric Gallery in the East Village in 1985, Michael Brensonof The New York Times wrote that the violence inherent in his early work had not fully left him.

“There are three paintings called ‘Rainstorm,’ in which raging water seems to be rushing toward us from within the canvas. In each of the paintings, sea and sky rage a bit more until they seem on the point of swallowing everything.”

By the early 90s he withdrew from the art scene. Keith Haring had died of AIDS at 31, Basquiat of a drug overdose at 27. Ms. Woodward said, he had become 

“paranoid about gallery culture and the impact on the artist and his freedoms.

His goal was to reach the sublime. He used drugs to get there. It was just who he was.”

In 2009, Vladimir Restoin-Roitfeld partnered with Andy Valmorbidas and talked him into making new work, shadowmen wearing suits, added to a retrospective exhibition in New York sponsored by Armani. For his documentary, Mr. Jacoby filmed Mr. Hambleton as he procrastinated and battled with his anxious patrons.

The show traveled to Europe, was successful, and a comeback was possible. but it didn’t last. Hambleton kept painting almost until he died, but he was becoming increasingly frail with cancer was eroding his face and his back was bowed and lopsided from his spinal conditions. He used his folding bicycle as a walker. There were times he was homeless.

He says about himself in the documentary, 

“At least Basquiat, you know, died. I was alive when I died, you know. That’s the problem.”

Richard Hambleton was 65.

(via NY Times)

WHY DID LEO DICAPRIO SURRENDER A $3 MILLION PICASSO, A $10 MILLION BASQUIAT (+ BRANDO'S OSCAR!) TO THE FEDS?

The production company, Red Granite, has found themselves the target of a government investigation for their alleged involvement in a money-laundering scheme that the Department of Justicesays are traceable to foreign corruption.

Leonardo DiCaprio was given the Marlon Brando‘s Oscar by Red Granite, who helped finance The Wolf of Wall Street. The U.S. Attorney’s Office’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Sectionput out a new government filing in order to seize rights to films and recover a bevy of items allegedly obtained with the illegal finances, Deadline reported. 

To assist the investigation, DiCaprio contacted the D.O.J. to return items that may have been tied to the investigation — including Brando’s Oscar, a Picasso painting, purchased for $3.28 million for DiCaprio, a $750,000 Diane Arbus photograph, and a Jean-Michel Basquait collage worth nearly $10 million.

Brando with his Oscar that Leo had to give to the Feds. It's OK. He's got his own

DiCario’s rep said in a statement,

“Last July, upon hearing of the government’s civil action against certain parties involved in the making of ‘The Wolf Of Wall Street’, Mr. DiCaprio’s representatives – working under his instruction – initiated contact with the Department of Justice. This effort was to determine if there were any gifts or charitable donations originating from the parties named in the civil complaint, and to offer the return of any such gifts or donations with the aid and instruction of the government.

Prior to the government’s filing of the civil pleading today, Mr. DiCaprio initiated return of these items, which were received and accepted by him for the purpose of being included in an annual charity auction to benefit his eponymous foundation. He has also returned an Oscar originally won by Marlon Brando, which was given to Mr. DiCaprio as a set gift by Red Granite to thank him for his work on The ‘Wolf Of Wall Street’.

Mr. DiCaprio is grateful for the support of the government in this effort, and continues to hope that justice is done in this matter.”

Variety reports that Red Granite is accused of drawing upwards of $4.5 billion from a fund called 1Malaysia Development Bhd, which was started in 2009 by Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak as a state-run entity.

The production company was said to put up $100 million for The Wolf of Wall Street, as well as donate to DiCaprio’s charity foundation and pay for an expensive gambling night with the actor in Las Vegas.

Red Granite remains in operation, and claims that it did not knowingly receive stolen funds. 

DiCaprio currently has no plans to turn over the money he got for The Wolf of Wall Street.

Basquiat's "Redman" was a gift from Red Granite to DiCaprio's charity foundation

Picasso’s “Nature Morte au Crane de Taureau”

(Top photo, Pacific Coast News; via People)

LOST POLAROIDS OF A 24 YEAR-OLD MADONNA BY RICHARD CORMAN

In June of 1983, Madonna was an ambitious 24-year-old (there were and ARE a lot of them in NYC.) Photographer Richard Corman met the young singer in her walkup apartment on East Fourth Street between A and B. It was the moment, as Corman says, 

“literally right before she stepped out and ran into the stratosphere.“

The month after they took these casual casting Polaroids, she released her debut album, Madonna, which produced three top-ten hits Holiday, Lucky Star and Borderline. A year later, she was writhing the stage in wedding dress (typed by Maripol) in her career-making MTV VMA performance of Like A Virgin. But when Corman took these Polaroids, she was still just DJ Jellybean Benitez’s girlfriend. As she wrote of that time, 

“I felt like a warrior plunging my way through the crowds to survive.” 

Corman was pretty well-connected young man in the early 80s. He had assisted Richard Avedon, and his mother Cis was a casting director who worked on films like Raging Bull and The Deer Hunter. (At the time he was also taking pictures of Keith Haring in Soho and Jean-Michel Basquiat at his Great Jones Street studio.) After 30 years 66 polaroids will finally get their due this fall as a book and an exhibit. Corman shared the story of how they came about with i-D magazine.

“These are images that I shot in 1983. What makes them so charming and special to me is actually the connection to my mother. She had introduced me to Madonna in the spring of ’83, when she was casting a movie called The Last Temptation of Christ, with Martin Scorsese. They auditioned Madonna for the Virgin Mary. As it turned out, Madonna never got the part, but she and I met each other at the time when I was working at Avedon Studios. I was looking constantly for interesting people to photograph. I had never met anyone really like her. She was original.

The Polaroid shoot came a bit later, when my mother was developing a niche musical called Cindy Rella. Madonna was actually at her brother’s apartment, and I needed to send [casting] pictures to Warner Bros ASAP. We didn’t do anything digitally or on an iPhone back then, we had Polaroids. So I shot about 66 Polaroids. We put together a book with a script for a treatment, and the casting. Michael Jackson or Prince would play the prince, Aretha Franklin was going to play the wicked stepmother. As it turned out, the movie never got made and the script and the 66 Polaroids were, I thought, lost for 30 years. Recently when I was going through my warehouse, cleaning it out from the farthest corner, my mouth was wide open to find that these images were just sitting there. In perfect condition.

If we did these pictures today there would be 30 people standing in that apartment. But it was just me and her, it was so simple. She was so accessible, funny, and sexy. She was so cool and had such charisma. So we started with the few pictures where she was cleaning the house as Cinderella, and then she’s getting ready for the ball. She went out and I think she took two hours to find that dress at some vintage store. At the time, she was kind of a local phenom.

I’m not necessarily a Madonna fan, but I’m certainly a fan of her determination, her spirit, and her energy. The pictures today feel a lot more relevant than they did back then. She was always relevant, of course. Just the way she was dressed, her hair, her makeup. Everything about her style and her swag was just 21st century. Between the denim and the red lips, and the cat eyes, the dark roots. Everything about her was now.

She knew exactly the way she wanted it to look. That evening, she met me and my mother and father up at this place on the Upper West Side where every New York City actor hung out. She walked in and she just stopped traffic. Nobody looked like her! She was a visionary in life, and she was certainly 100% original.

When I first met her and went to her apartment, she had to show me up the stairs because it was a building that was full of thugs. They protected her. She said, 

‘Richard, you can’t come into the building until you tell me you’re here so I can tell the guys downstairs.‘

She was the pied piper of the neighborhood. People would come to her apartment to have pizza, go to the roof to sing and dance. She embraced it, and the city was really rough back then.”

Richard Corman’s 66 Polaroids will be out this fall from NJG, accompanied by an exhibition.

(via i-D magazine)

DAVID BOWIE'S ART COLLECTION TOURS LONDON, NEW YORK, L.A. & HONG KONG

Forty works from the late rock legend, David Bowie’s collection are on view at Sotheby’s in London for the next three weeks before moving on to L.A., New York and Hong Kong in the fall. The musician’s life as a collector was something he kept hidden from the view of the public. But now, nearly 300 works by artists like Damien Hirst, Henry Moore and Marcel Duchamp are auctioned off this November. Most coveted (and valuable) is Jean-Michel Basquiat’s five-and-a-half foot tall painting, Air Power, which Bowie bought in 1995. Oliver Barker, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe said,

“David Bowie’s collection offers a unique insight into the personal world of one of the 20th Century’s greatest creative spirits.“

Bowie himself told the New York Times in 1998,

“Art was, seriously, the only thing I’d ever wanted to own. It can change the way that I feel in the mornings.”

LONDON, Preview Exhibition
20 July–9 August

LOS ANGELES
September 20-21

NEW YORK
September 26-29

HONG KONG
October 12-15

Not many of us can afford the art, but the catalogue, Bowie/Collector, is a great piece of pop culture memorabilia. I’ve amassed a mini-collection of them over the years; Andy Warhol, Liberace, Jackie Kennedy, Katherine Hepburn, Michael Jackson & Marilyn Monroe to name a few. I have to add this one, but at $286 for the 3-volumn set, I might need to sell some of my own art first.

Sotheby’s is open to the public and free of charge. For more info, go here.

Damien Hirst, 1995

Jean Michael Basquiat, 1984

Peter Layton, 1961

Frank Auerbach, Head of Gerda Boehm, 1965

Romuald Hazoumé, 1995

Ettore Sottsass, ‘Casablanca’ Sideboard, 1981

View fullsize

Pier Giacomo & Achille Castiglioni, Brionvega Radiophonograph, 1965

PAIGE POWELL'S UNSEEN PICS ARE A PEEK INTO 80s NYC & WARHOL'S WORLD

Paige Powell was the associate publisher of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. She came to New York City from Oregon in 1980 armed with her camera and joined Warhol’s inner circle. She photographed the scene over the next decade, like her boyfriend, Jean-Michel Basquiat (captured in a series of nudes) designer Stephen Sprouse, Madonna, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf among others.

All these images were stashed in boxes under Powell’s bed for decades, but they’ve been taken out for a new exhibit at the Portland Art Museum. Paige Powell: The Ride.

Paige Powell At 15 West 81st, New York City, 1983

The Ride, is the first part of the multimedia installation which, includes video with never-before-seen recordings of Powell’s pals, including new footage of Warhol and Haring. Photographer/director David LaChapelle also mixed a soundtrack for the second part of the installation called Beulah Land, an interactive exhibit featuring over 800 images recreating a 1984 exhibition of Powell’s photographs in NYC.

The museum is hosting several other programs and events in conjunction with the exhibit, including a conversation between Powell and co-curator Brian Ferriso today, November 19. The exhibit is up through February 21, 2016 and you can find out more here.

Beulah Land (162 Avenue A) opening, January 15, 1984

Susan Hannaford (center) in a montage of Powel's pics in "The Ride"

Madonna, Fresh 14, New York City, 1984

(Jean Michel looking at Andy) Still From ‘The Ride’, 2015

Andy Warhol And Grace Jones, Nippon, New York City, 1985

Sting, Bob Dylan And Andy Warhol, New York City, 1986

Andy Warhol Studio, 860 Broadway, NYC, 1983

Andy Warhol’s Private Desk, 860 Broadway, NYC, 1982

Andy Warhol Posing As Invisible Sculpture, Area, New York City, 1985

WAS ANDY WARHOL THE ORIGINAL INSTAGRAMER?

We’re all obsessed with Instagram these days, but Andy Warhol was snapping photos of his surroundings long before Instagram’s creators were even born. Reuel Golden, editor of Andy Warhol Polaroids 1958–1987, told The Huffington Post;

“Andy was probably the original Instagrammer, in a way. While the artist is well known for consorting with his own posse of Factory kids and superstars, as his films and photographs from the era reveal, he was also socializing with big-name actors, musicians, fashion designers and artists — and documenting every bit of it. This intersection of the private and the public in Warhol’s daily life came to light thanks to the Polaroid camera, which Golden called the “perfect tool for moving between capturing all those different facets.” 

Golden’s new book features polaroids by Andy of everyone from Jack Nicholson to Audrey Hepburn, Divine to Jean-Michel Basquiat, Grace Jones to Dolly Parton, and beyond. 

Art critic Richard B. Woodward writes in the book’s introduction;

“These portraits signify who was welcome into Warhol’s club, a place at once private, snobbish and hostile to middle-class squares and yet open to scores of outcasts, the prodigiously talented or the merely sensational and anyone making news on the front page or the gossip section of the tabloids.”

Golden says:

“With this celebrity culture these days, a lot of these celebrities have professional retouchers who work on their Instagram account. I think to Warhol that was the very antithesis of what Warhol and his Polaroids in particular represent.” It’s the rawness in his instant photos that separates them from the filtered images of today; the flash bouncing off a slightly out-of-focus Nicholson in mid-sentence; a naked couple in the shower modestly smiling at the camera; Warhol’s mother, Julia Warhola, holding a knife and apple in a messy bedroom wearing only a nightgown and rolled-down leggings. 

This unabashed rawness is also present in his selfies. While the concept of a selfie, in and of itself, is wrapped up in pure self-promotion with an inherent air of vanity, Warhol’s were ripe with vulnerability as he posed shirtless, content with exposing his imperfections.”

Well, to be honest, in the day I was a big Polaroid user too (I even have a signed Polaroid I shot of Andy!) and this is how I’ve always used Instagram– as my Polaroid “sharing system”. The Square format –which has is NOT just square now – lends itself perfectly to this...

Andy Warhol Polaroids 1958–1987 is now available at TASCHEN.com.

(via Huffington Post)

NEW WHITNEY: A PEEK INSIDE "AMERICA IS HARD TO SEE"

In my previous post, I gave you my take on the Whitney from the outside. When the new Whitney Museum of American Art opens doors to step inside, on May 1, 2015, the first exhibit is selection of works from the Museum’s permanent collection, called “America is Hard To See“. It features over 600 works by some 400 artists, from about 1900 up to the present. The exhibition’s title is taken from a poem by Robert Frost and the show delves deep into the Whitney’s collection, reflecting the way artists think and work. All mediums are presented together without hierarchy. Numerous pieces that have rarely, if ever, been shown, appear alongside familiar icons, in an effort to challenge how we think about American art. With 600+ works it is nearly IMPOSSIBLE to even scratch the surface visually, the scope of the show is so broad, so, I’ve just introduced the galleries here that get progressively larger as you go down each level. So many treasures in one gallery after the next, I could go on and on… I’ve been to the museum twice now, and I was so excited by the whole, that I'll return again and again to focus on seeing individual works. There’s a great, new handbook of the collection that I recommend. No matter HOW much you know (or think you know) there are artists and work to discover that you’ve missed, I’ll bet.

My favorite galleries, for many reasons, Abstract Expressionism & Pop, also happen to represent my own interests as an artist and the time that I entered the planet. There are real masterpieces in the center gallery that work SO well together it kind of made me giddy; Alex Katz‘s Ada alongside Warhol‘s Nose Job; Jasper John’s Three Flags next to Alan D’Arcangelo‘s Madonna & Child. But you also get Calder’s Circus, choice Edward Hopper & several sublime Georgia O’Keefe‘s on the top floor.... 

The fifth floor with the most recent work represents my time in New York City and there are many friends and aquantainces represented here; Keith Haring, Jean Michel Basquiat, Mark Morrisroe, David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar, Robert Mapplethorpe… all dead by AIDS with the exception of Jean Michel. Great work on that floor but death and loss is represented by the missing in its center and at the far end, a painting of planes crashing into the World Trade Center. You can now see the newly opened WTC from the terraces, so, we don’t forget, but life goes on. NYC and humanity is self-renewing and that’s hopeful and exciting. I’ll tell you the whole city is excited by this new museum opening. At dinner the other night, at the Polo Bar, I brought the aforementioned handbook to my pal Veronica Hinman for her birthday and the bag was sitting on the banquet. A twenty-something waiter came over to ask if I had been to the museum and he was SO excited to hear about it. This is New York City, kids, we don’t get that excited about much! You see De Niro on the street and it’s like, “Hi, Bob.” So, come and see for yourself and GET INTO IT. For more info, you can go here.