“Andy would start one [painting] and put something very recognisable on it, or a product logo, and I would sort of deface it,” Basquiat once explained. “Then I would try to get him to work some more on it, I would try to get him to do at least two things.”
Their relationship didn’t only exist in abstraction and contrast, though. Friendships form through mutual real-life experience. Even professionally, creative networks ruminate shared pain points to fuel bodies of art. Warhol and Basquiat’s artworks culminate in this phenomenon, emerging from their base in New York, USA. Pieces like Ten Punching Bags (The Last Supper), honing into race, religion and the AIDS epidemic, give insight into their joint criticality of peripheral cultural issues.