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Lot Essay
Held in the same private collection for almost three decades, Horizontal Painting (1984) is an impressive work from the project that brought together three giants of 1980s New York: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol and Francesco Clemente. In this historic collaboration, one artist would begin a canvas before it was sent onto the next artist’s studio, each without knowing what interventions or additions might result. Played out against Horizontal Painting’s green backdrop, each unmistakable hand makes its mark as Basquiat’s quickfire oilstick, Warhol’s Pop screenprint and Clemente’s vivid, Neo-Expressionist figuration combine and interact with one another. Debuted in 1984 at the Zurich gallery of Bruno Bischofberger, the dealer and collector who sparked the collaboration, the work was recently included in the major 2023 exhibition Basquiat x Warhol: Painting Four Hands at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, and in Andy Warhol Three Times Out at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, in 2023-2024.
A collaborative spirit was in the air when Bischofberger proposed the idea in 1983. Both Basquiat and Clemente had made drawings in the guestbook at the gallerist’s home in St. Moritz together with his daughter, Cora, who was then around four years old; Basquiat had even painted a canvas with Cora in the family garage. In 1982, Bischofberger had organised the first formal meeting between Basquiat and Warhol, identifying a thrilling combination in their respective youthful energy and Pop froideur. Inspired by these conversations—and by the ways in which many postmodern painters were remixing other artists’ work at the time—he conceived of a process that recalled the Surrealist parlour game of cadavre exquis, or ‘exquisite corpse’, with the work in progress passing between the three different parties. Horizontal Painting is one of just fifteen paintings that were completed in this three-way manner before Clemente withdrew from the project.
Horizontal Painting is a crucible of different ideas. Basquiat’s white oilstick—a list of consumer goods, a Ferris-wheel form, scrawled-out lettering and a zoomorphic image captioned ‘BABOON’—runs both beneath and over Warhol’s silkscreened runway models, implying that he worked on the canvas for two sittings. The picture of the women is oriented sideways, and Basquiat has further adorned them with outlined anatomies, recalling his treatment of classical statues in works such as Untitled (Venus/The Great Circle) (1983, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). The image is derived from Warhol’s 1982 photograph of an Azzedine Alaïa fashion show at Bergdorf Goodman. To the left is one of Clemente’s distinctive wide-eyed figures, who holds a cloth to his face and uses another as if to wipe away part of his own body from the canvas. He looks over his shoulder to meet the viewer’s gaze, inviting them into the painting’s surreal, self-referential play of erasure, addition and transformation.
The three artists brought distinct perspectives to the partnership. Warhol was by now an elder statesman, having led the Pop Art revolution in the 1960s; Clemente and Basquiat belonged to a younger generation, each representing different strains of the Neo-Expressionist movement that took New York by storm during the 1980s. Sharp wits, friendly competition and mutual respect prevailed among the trio. They each made portraits of one another in paintings, drawings and Polaroids. Another friend, the artist Keith Haring, marvelled at the collaborations. He described ‘a physical conversation happening in paint instead of words. The sense of humour, the snide remarks, the profound realisations, the simple chit-chat all happened with paint and brushes … There was a sense that one was watching something being unveiled and discovered for the first time’ (K. Haring, ‘Painting the Third Mind’, Collaborations: Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, exh. cat. Mayor Rowan Gallery, London, 1988).
Basquiat’s polyvocal approach—quoting and overwriting snatches from music, television, textbooks and art history—lent itself naturally to an art of collaboration. In his Factory, Warhol was at the centre of a network of associates, assistants and inspiring friends who allowed him to produce his vision. For Clemente, meanwhile, ‘it seemed a miracle to be able to join forces with the artists I respected and to defy, with a collaboration, the ever-narrowing boundaries of the art world narratives.’ While he had made his name in New York, he had been working since the late 1970s with sign-painters, shadow-puppet makers and miniaturists in India. ‘I considered the fragmentation of the self’, he said, ‘as the main theme of my work’ (F. Clemente in conversation with D. Buchhart, 2011, in Basquiat x Warhol: Painting Four Hands, exh. cat. Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris 2023, p. 87). In Horizontal Painting, themes of artistic ego and Oedipal rivalry are treated with playful irony. Three voices combine, clash and riff upon one another to create something even greater than the sum of its parts.
A collaborative spirit was in the air when Bischofberger proposed the idea in 1983. Both Basquiat and Clemente had made drawings in the guestbook at the gallerist’s home in St. Moritz together with his daughter, Cora, who was then around four years old; Basquiat had even painted a canvas with Cora in the family garage. In 1982, Bischofberger had organised the first formal meeting between Basquiat and Warhol, identifying a thrilling combination in their respective youthful energy and Pop froideur. Inspired by these conversations—and by the ways in which many postmodern painters were remixing other artists’ work at the time—he conceived of a process that recalled the Surrealist parlour game of cadavre exquis, or ‘exquisite corpse’, with the work in progress passing between the three different parties. Horizontal Painting is one of just fifteen paintings that were completed in this three-way manner before Clemente withdrew from the project.
Horizontal Painting is a crucible of different ideas. Basquiat’s white oilstick—a list of consumer goods, a Ferris-wheel form, scrawled-out lettering and a zoomorphic image captioned ‘BABOON’—runs both beneath and over Warhol’s silkscreened runway models, implying that he worked on the canvas for two sittings. The picture of the women is oriented sideways, and Basquiat has further adorned them with outlined anatomies, recalling his treatment of classical statues in works such as Untitled (Venus/The Great Circle) (1983, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). The image is derived from Warhol’s 1982 photograph of an Azzedine Alaïa fashion show at Bergdorf Goodman. To the left is one of Clemente’s distinctive wide-eyed figures, who holds a cloth to his face and uses another as if to wipe away part of his own body from the canvas. He looks over his shoulder to meet the viewer’s gaze, inviting them into the painting’s surreal, self-referential play of erasure, addition and transformation.
The three artists brought distinct perspectives to the partnership. Warhol was by now an elder statesman, having led the Pop Art revolution in the 1960s; Clemente and Basquiat belonged to a younger generation, each representing different strains of the Neo-Expressionist movement that took New York by storm during the 1980s. Sharp wits, friendly competition and mutual respect prevailed among the trio. They each made portraits of one another in paintings, drawings and Polaroids. Another friend, the artist Keith Haring, marvelled at the collaborations. He described ‘a physical conversation happening in paint instead of words. The sense of humour, the snide remarks, the profound realisations, the simple chit-chat all happened with paint and brushes … There was a sense that one was watching something being unveiled and discovered for the first time’ (K. Haring, ‘Painting the Third Mind’, Collaborations: Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, exh. cat. Mayor Rowan Gallery, London, 1988).
Basquiat’s polyvocal approach—quoting and overwriting snatches from music, television, textbooks and art history—lent itself naturally to an art of collaboration. In his Factory, Warhol was at the centre of a network of associates, assistants and inspiring friends who allowed him to produce his vision. For Clemente, meanwhile, ‘it seemed a miracle to be able to join forces with the artists I respected and to defy, with a collaboration, the ever-narrowing boundaries of the art world narratives.’ While he had made his name in New York, he had been working since the late 1970s with sign-painters, shadow-puppet makers and miniaturists in India. ‘I considered the fragmentation of the self’, he said, ‘as the main theme of my work’ (F. Clemente in conversation with D. Buchhart, 2011, in Basquiat x Warhol: Painting Four Hands, exh. cat. Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris 2023, p. 87). In Horizontal Painting, themes of artistic ego and Oedipal rivalry are treated with playful irony. Three voices combine, clash and riff upon one another to create something even greater than the sum of its parts.