On the canvas dating from 1985, everything is shown in triplicate: the French flag that gradually falls apart, the Eiffel Tower leaning dangerously and the frogs as a reference to the pride of French gastronomy. Eiffel Tower is the fruit of a "pas de deux" between Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) and Andy Warhol (1928-1987). The shooting star of the 1980s and the peroxide pope of pop art merged their style and also their temperaments in more than a hundred works from 1984 to 1985. The painting draws on the double Parisian memories of the two Americans. Did Basquiat imagine it after seeing the fireworks on July 14, 1985, from the Parisian apartment of filmmaker Diane Kurys? Or was the composition inspired by his friend Warhol, who visited the French capital a good 20 times between 1977 and 1987?
The mystery remains, even for Dieter Buchhart. The curator of the exhibition Basquiat × Warhol, à quatre mains (Basquiat × Warhol. Painting 4 Hands) at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris presents the two artists' collaboration, as intense as it was tortuous, from April 5 to August 28. Basquiat, a true phenomenon of the art world, has been featured in numerous retrospectives in the French capital. His relationship with the world of music will also be celebrated from April 6 to July 30 at the Philharmonie de Paris.
The American artist chose Paris as his refuge. He crossed the Atlantic at least four times between 1983 and 1988. At that time, the man who began his career in New York as a graffiti artist was already famous. Unlike many of his peers, Basquiat did not need Paris to establish his legitimacy. Apart from a few insiders, few French met him. In the capital, he enjoyed tranquility, playing tourist and eagerly visiting museums where the works of the great masters he loved, such as Leonardo da Vinci or Henri Matisse, were exhibited. He was both a star and anonymous.
Bustling New York in Reagan's America
The young man with the French name – his father was Haitian and his mother a New Yorker of Puerto Rican origin – followed the road taken 50 years earlier by the American writers Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller. Times were very different then. In the '20s and '30s, the City of Light was in its golden age. Cultural life was vibrant, prohibition did not rule as it did in America and sexual freedom was more widely enjoyed. Black artists and intellectuals who fled racial segregation, such as Josephine Baker or the painter Lois Mailou Jones, found asylum in Paris. After World War II, hundreds of men who had fought in the war converged on art schools, taking advantage of scholarships for former GIs to study in the United States or abroad.
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