? The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London 2009
The New Portrait
1984
- Artist Rooms
In the 1980s Warhol came to be idolised by several emerging artists, in particular Francesco Clemente, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. This poster displays one of a series of different portraits Warhol made of Basquiat in 1984. It is based on a sequence of Polaroid photographs that Warhol took in August 1983, which, when pieced together, show the promising young artist?s athletic body in the idealised, statuesque pose of Michelangelo?s `David?. Warhol?s use of the negative images not only draws to mind his `Reversals? series, which he began in 1979, but also alludes to x-ray film, mortality and ethereal visions - a notion made more poignant with the knowledge that both artists would be dead by the end of the decade.