This year, instead of hosting her famous pre-Oscar party at her Los Angeles home during awards season (I have a weakness for entertaining, she said The New Yorker in november), Larry Gagosian will return to his roots. Not as an enterprising Los Angeles con artist selling framed posters on Broxton Avenue in Westwood, but as the dealer who first brought Jean Michel Basquiat’s work to collectors outside of New York. In March, the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles will open “Made on Market Street,” the first exhibition comprised only the work done by Basquiat in the early 1980s in the sunny, palm-fringed West Coast city.
The show’s premise appears at odds with established history: Basquiat was born in Brooklyn and rose to fame as a graffiti artist on New York’s Lower East Side. After his death in 1988 of an overdose at the age of 27 in his Great Jones Street home and studio, Basquiat was buried in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. But the new show, and Gagosian, say that Los Angeles, and specifically Venice Beach, was a critical turning point in Basquiat’s life and art.
As Gagosian said ARTnews recently, he was new to New York and the art scene when he met Basquiat in the high-ceilinged basement studio of Annina Nosei’s SoHo gallery in 1981.
“I had a loft on West Broadway where I hung a couple of paintings every now and then, but I wasn’t very far along in my career as an art dealer when I met Basquiat,” Gagosian said.. “I was a boy from Los Angeles completely seduced by New York. The whole thing moved me.”
Basquiat also moved the young dealer. The artist was relatively unknown when they met, but Gagosian, like Nosei, could tell that the artist had tapped into, or was creating, a new way of painting.
As he reminisced about the period, Gagosian recalled a quote from entertainment mogul and longtime client David Geffen, whose encyclopedic collection of postwar American art has been compared to the Frick’s collection of Old Masters.
“Someone asked [Geffen] how to succeed in business,” Gagosian said. “David’s response was ‘Keep your head down and hope you hit a genius.’ Basquiat certainly was that genius for me. In addition to his energy and talent, no one made paintings like this before him or after him. It was like cubism. What I was doing didn’t exist before.”
Shortly after meeting, Gagosian asked Basquiat if he would like a show in Los Angeles. Early the following year, just a month after Nosei’s gallery in New York hosted the painter’s first exhibition, Gagosian opened a show of Basquiat’s work at his North Altamont Drive gallery. That November, Gagosian told Basquiat to come live with him in a new three-story house on Market Street in Venice Beach. Designed by Studio Works, it came equipped with a gallery and studio, the first of which became Basquiat’s workspace.
![Jean-Michael Basquiat [center]Keith Haring at the Whitney Museum of American Art Manhattan, New York](https://www.artnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/0556.LG_Basquiat.jpg?w=400)
Larry Gagosian and Jean-Michel Basquiat c. 1982
Photofest
Over the next two years, during two extended stays, Basquiat made between 70 and 80 paintings at the Venice Beach house. During the first period, Gagosian and Basquiat lived together for about a year.
“It didn’t take long to get organized, order canvases, paint,” Gagosian said. “He was such a driven artist … and a fun-loving guy.”
In the account of biographer Phoebe Hoban Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, the party started before the artist arrived in Los Angeles. Gagosian bought first class tickets for the artist and his crew: Rammellzee, Toxic, A1 and Fab 5 Freddie. As soon as the plane took off, Basquiat and his entourage began pouring cocaine and lighting spirits. “I’ve never seen anything like it on a plane…” Gagosian told Hoban, “The flight attendant freaked out. I was terrified. I thought, ‘Oh my God, we’re going to jail.'” When the flight attendant told the group that the police would be waiting for them when hit the track, Basquiat apparently looked up and said, “Oh, I thought this was the first. class”.
“The manager came over afterwards to warn us about Jean-Michelle and his friends and said that if they didn’t get rid of the cocaine the police would be waiting for them at the airport,” said Annina Nosei, Basquiat’s first art dealer. said ARTnews. “Larry looked at me and said, ‘Annina, you’re the mother, go ahead and do something!’
As in New York, Basquiat quickly became a fixture in Los Angeles’ burgeoning music and club scene. Basquiat’s friend, occasional assistant and Gagosian staff member Matt Dike was instrumental in the city’s night scene and the two had made records at the Power Tools club, going to dance with filmmaker Tamra Davis, who later managed it. Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, and rub elbows with rappers Tone Loc and Young MC. But, more than anything, Basquiat was in LA to work.
“He was always working. He always had a pencil in his hand,” Gagosian said. He stayed out late, but often the events of the night before inspired the next day’s work.
The studio floor of Gagosian’s Venice Beach home was covered in paint splatters, Leonardo da Vinci sketchbooks and Cy Twombly catalogs, Basquiat moving excitedly from canvas to canvas, while Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie played on the stereo. Basquiat kept a mattress in the corner to rest on or, just as often, for friends like Davis, painter Mike Kelley, or Gagosian to sit and watch Basquiat paint until dawn. Basquiat’s then-girlfriend, Madonna, was a frequent guest during the artist’s first stay in Los Angeles, a true power couple at the time. Another guest, according to Gagosian, was Herbert Schorr, one of Basquiat’s earliest and most dedicated collectors.
“Such a smart collector, smarter than me,” Gagosian said, noting that Schorr bought and kept some of Basquiat’s best paintings. “While I was showing the paintings to Herb, Basquiat was just lounging under the covers with Madonna. It was fun.”
(Incidentally, Madonna, currently on tour, is performing at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles on the day “Made on Market Street” opens.)
It was also during the first stay in Los Angeles that Basquiat met Fred Hoffman, who co-organized “Made on Market Street.” Like most Angelenos, Hoffman met Basquiat through Gagosian, who suggested they work together on a series of silkscreen works through Hoffman’s printing house, New City Editions. Among them is the monumental work tuxedo, which was made in an edition of ten and which is among the pillars of the new exhibition.
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT tuxedo, 1983. © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio. Courtesy of Gagosian
Fredrik Nilsen
tuxedo consists of a combined set of 15 separate drawings and a collage, originally done on white paper with black images. According to Hoffman, Basquiat wanted to reverse the colors for the final piece. They achieved this through a photographic process and then turning the 16 works into one large screen print. At just over 102 × 59 inches, the clear black and white tuxedo, finished with Basquiat’s signature crown motif, represented a consciously sharp contrast to the colorful works that Basquiat usually produced. Hoffman, in a piece for Gagosian Quarterly about the tuxedo creation, said that Basquiat’s desire to turn “all white into black was not just a look he wished to achieve. [His] Aesthetic decisions were his means of questioning certain social and cultural assumptions, identity being the most important among them.”
Another highlight of the exhibition is hollywood africans, which in a way documents Basquiat’s stay in LA. “It’s basically a storyboard depicting Jean-Michel and Rammellzee and Toxic on their journey through Hollywood,” Hoffman said. ARTnews. “You know, going to Gorman’s Chinese Theater as tourists. Jean-Michel’s idea is to make himself and his friends the new Black Hollywood celebrities.”
That work is one of many loans Gagosian and Hoffman secured to put on the show. Hollywood Africans it was purchased by television mogul Doug Kramer during Basquiat’s second show in Los Angeles in 1983, then donated to the Whitney Museum in New York. Loans also came from the Broad Art Foundation in Los Angeles, the Museum Brandhorst in Munich, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and a handful of private collections about which Gagosian was not surprising.
The work Museum security (Broadway Meltdown) It stands out, not only because it is one of the first works to comment on the high prices that Basquiat was able to command, but also because it refers to one of his favorite films, Black Orpheus (1959). In the exhibition catalogue, Hoffman writes that it is possible that the painting is also a veiled reference to Basquiat and Madonna’s doomed relationship, as the film is based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
“With Madonna’s sudden departure,” a few weeks after her arrival, Hoffman writes, “and Black Orpheus on his mind, Basquiat made a commitment. Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown), with its multiple texts and unique image referred to [Orpheus’s] tragic relationship with Eurydice, as his means to print in a work of art this seminal moment of his private life.
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT, Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown), 1983. © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Courtesy of Gagosian
Robert McKeever
At the time, Basquiat’s concerts in LA at Gagosian were a huge success. In a 2012 conversation with billionaire collector Peter Brant published in Interview magazine, Gagosian said the exhibitions were a testament to Basquiat’s talent. “It’s one thing to have a successful show in New York with local people, but then to bring that kind of work to Los Angeles and have it resonate, I mean, this was emphatically New York, urban work. It gives you a real sense of the power of art what was he doing.”
For art dealer Jeffrey Deitch, a longtime friend of Gagosian who attended Basquiat’s two Los Angeles concerts in the early 1980s, the period is “relatively little known” and one of the “most important” of the artist’s career.
“They’re brighter,” Deitch said ARTnews of Basquiat’s pieces made in Venice Beach. “They have a little more pop, and the iconography is very strong. The distinctive quality of some of those LA works is a part of contemporary art history that still needs to be studied.
Nosei agrees. she said ARTnews that the group of paintings done in Los Angeles were among the best Basquiat had ever done, and were far superior to the paintings Basquiat did for a one-man show organized by Mary Boone and Bruno Bischofberger at Boone’s gallery in 1984.
That chapter, Dietch added, was also very important to Gagosian’s career. “I’m not sure I’ve ever had that kind of close relationship with an artist, sharing a house and all the incredible work created there, it’s so meaningful,” he said.
For Gagosian and Hoffman, a show of Basquiat’s works in LA, which includes works from a second period in which he lived at the L’Ermitage hotel in West Hollywood, has been a long time in the making.
“I had been thinking about a show like this for a while,” said Gagosian, whose gallery has held at least five Basquiat shows since his death in 1988, “But I called Fred and said, ‘Let’s do it, let’s do it. Let’s commit to it.’ It just felt like the time was right.”
Like the recent one pleasure king, a Basquiat exhibition organized by his sisters that places the artist in the context of his family rather than the more glamorous parts of his career, “Made on Market Street” attempts to bring to life an artist many simply think of in terms of brand and brand . hammer prices
