Nevada gets view of Basquiat painting and documentary

It is not often a Basquiat painting makes it’s way to Nevada, but the Nevada Museum of Art is now exhibiting the 1983 Basquiat painting Flash in Naples (recently bought at auction in New York). It will be on view until the November 28th. They will also be showing the Tamra Davis film Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child tomorrow, October 21st. See: http://www.nevadaart.org/exhibitions/detail?eid=180

Basquiat / Warhol works in Baltimore

The “Andy Warhol: The Last Decade” exhibition, which opened at the Milwaukee Art Museum, and which I saw later at the Brooklyn Museum of Art is now at its last stop, on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art until January 9th, 2011. In its Brooklyn incarnation it included four Warhol Basquiat collaborations. One was the Basquiat/Warhol/Clemente collaboration Origin of Cotton, where what look like Basquiat painting over the top of the other two artists is actually Basquiat adopting Warhol’s silkscreen technique to his own drawings. Also on show are three large Warhol/Basquiat collaborations, from the hundreds of works they did together. Typical of these paintings are Untitled (50 Dentures) from 1984 (in Brooklyn but not in the printed catalog), and Untitled (Heart Attack). This work apparently refers to the 1980 murder of the famous "Scarsdale diet doctor" cardiologist, and features a mashup of Warhol's giant screened stake with Basquiat additions, including the words "meat, sugar, tobacco, alcohol." The third large Untitled collaboration looks more like a Basquiat work than a Warhol, and features Basquiat’s signature line drawings in paint, and his crossing out of Warhol’s “Sin No More” silkscreen to read just “Sin” (a joke in both English and Spanish).

Auction Previews

Speaking of Warhol and Basquiat, the famous Dos Cabezas (1982) -- the painting Basquiat did of himself and Warhol and gave to the older artist, which helped start their friendship -- will be up for auction, and on view at Christie’s in New York from November 6th to 10th. There are several other Basquiat paintings, prints and drawings on view in the next month in auction previews. Between October 23rd and November 11th there are 14 works up for sale, see the auction page of this website for details.

The above glimpses of Basquait are nothing compared to the enormous Basquiat show now on view in Paris.

Retrospective in Paris

This is the great retrospective exhibition that first opened at the Fondation Beyeler, Switzerland (see previous posts, giving a review of the show, and showing footage of the exhibition).

It has now moved to its last stop, the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, where it opened to great celebration and publicity on October 15th. It contains over 100 works spanning his artistic career, including many masterpieces by the artist. It will be there till January 30th, 2011. Anyone with any interest in his work should try to get to see it. See http://mam.paris.fr/en/node/243 for details.