Poster featuring image of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat in boxing gloves in fighter pose, photographed by Michael Halsband, published jointly by Tony Shafrazi and Bruno Bischofberger in conjunction with show held at Shafrazi's New York Gallery, September 14 - October 19, 1985. Folded in four, as issued, for mailing.
LAST year, I wrote of Jean-Michel Basquiat that he had a chance of becoming a very good painter providing he didn't succumb to the forces that would make him an art world mascot. This year, it appears that those forces have prevailed, for Basquiat is now onstage at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery at 163 Mercer Street, doing a pas de deux with Andy Warhol, a mentor who assisted in his rise to fame.
Actually, it's a version of the Oedipus story: Warhol, one of Pop's pops, paints, say, General Electric's logo, a New York Post headline or his own image of dentures; his 25-year-old protege adds to or subtracts from it with his more or less expressionistic imagery. The 16 results - all ''Untitleds,' of course - are large, bright, messy, full of private jokes and inconclusive.
Reported to have been a serious but at the same time amusing collaboration, which was staged in Warhol's studio and on his canvases, it is a historic event for having inspired him to put brush to canvas for the first time since 1962. Nevertheless, the old master's contribution is hard-edged as if printed, except in the piece involving blue and yellow bow ties, untied, Felix the Cat and two black female nudes. Felix and the ties are his, of course, but so, too, is the only slightly less primitive of the nudes. Basquiat continues to alternate between African themes, inherited by way of his Haitian background, and cartoon figures, but the social comment implicit in his previous work has now become obvious and rather silly. Working on Warhol's headlines about a subway fire and the F.B.I.'s pursuit of a Soviet agent, he washes red over them so that the letters ASS stand out, and presses the point by adding the black shape of a mule. Elsewhere, he embellishes a headline about a subway fire with dead cartoon figures, one in a sweater with stripes that are melting, and, across the banner about a socialite falling to her death, he scatters Spiderman heads.
Art historians may be able to relate this manifestation to the automatist poetry that certain Surrealists wrote collectively. They may even invoke Robert Rauschenberg's erasure of a de Kooning drawing and the mustache Duchamp added to a Mona Lisa reproduction. Anything is possible. But here and now, the collaboration looks like one of Warhol's manipulations, which increasingly seem based on the Mencken theory about nobody going broke underestimating the public's intelligence. Basquiat, meanwhile, comes across as the all too willing accessory.
Offered in the same spirit as the show's poster featuring photographs of the artists dressed as boxers at the ready, the verdict is: ''Warhol, TKO in 16 rounds.''
— Vivien Raynor, "ART: BASQUIAT, WARHOL," New York Times, September. 20, 1985
