James Haddrell speaks on The Collaboration

In May 2020, not long after the pandemic had really begun to take hold in this country, a piece of street art appeared on an outer wall of the University Hospital in Southampton.

The image, which proved to be by Banksy, showed a boy with a basket of action figures, but while Batman and Spiderman were left in the basket, the boy was holding a nurse, flying through the sky complete with cape and Covid mask.

The hospital retains a reproduction of the work, but the original was sold by Christie’s earlier this year for a staggering $23,176,314 – Banksy’s most expensive artwork ever sold at auction. However, Banksy is far from the first artist to gain fame for his graffiti or street art.

In 1978, a young black man named Jean-Michel Basquiat dropped out of school in Brooklyn, spent time living on the streets of Manhattan, and became one half of a duo painting what was dubbed SAMO graffiti in SoHo.

Like Banksy, Basquiat was interested in injustice and inequality, whether economic, racial or cultural, and his artwork satirised the area, the art world and the rich with what the SoHo News called “Olympian wit”.

His fame did not develop organically. He found support from art dealer Bruno Bischofberger, and then most famously was taken under the wing of Andy Warhol.

It seems likely that the former influenced the latter. Warhol was already aware of Basquiat (a diary entry by Warhol talks about the younger artist as “the kid who used the name ‘Samo’ when he used to sit on the sidewalk in Greenwich Village and paint T-shirts, and I’d give him $10”) but it was Bischofberger who introduced them properly, and their friendship and collaboration came later.

The partnership between the two artists, which culminated in a shared exhibition, is the subject of a new play announced by the Young Vic last week as part of their spring 2022 season, written by Anthony McCarten, directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah and starring Paul Bettany as Warhol and Jeremy Pope as Basquiat.

Warhol is famously remembered as saying that “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”.

There is a prescience to that comment, given the world we live in where lives are played out, whether shown honestly or through a range of filters, across a host of digital platforms for the world to observe, and there are certainly moments where individuals explode into the spotlight for a comment or an image and then disappear again.

For these two artists, though, fame seemed destined to last. While Banksy’s Southampton work sold for almost $25million, three years earlier a 1982 painting by Basquiat sold for over four times that.

Had the astonishing young artist not died in 1988, at the age of 27, who knows what heights of fame he could have reached.

As Warhol wrote in his diary, two years after the two artists met properly, “I think he’s the best, I really do.”