© 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.
