Basquiat, Jean-Michel

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    Angelina Jolie and the Ghosts of New York Past

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    Her new store, Atelier Jolie, occupies an unassuming building on Great Jones Street with an illustrious history.When Angelina Jolie opened her first fashion boutique in a squat, two-story building at 57 Great Jones Street in Lower Manhattan this month, she joined a long line of notable New Yorkers, including gangsters and artists, who lived or worked at that unassuming address.Atelier Jolie, which has an appointment-only fitting room on the second floor, sells clothes made from vintage and deadstock materials and offers Turkish coffee and Syrian mini pies in its chic cafe. “I hope to see you there, and to be one of the many creating with you within our new creative collective,” Ms. Jolie wrote in a founding statement. “Bear with me. I hope to grow this with you.”Atelier Jolie’s branding is tied to the artistic heritage of 57 Great Jones Street. Andy Warhol bought the building in the 1970s. Everyone from Keith Haring to Madonna dropped by. Jean-Michel Basquiat lived and painted in the upstairs studio loft, producing some of his most significant works, before he died there of a heroin overdose at 27 in 1988.Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, artists with ties to 57 Great Jones Street, at a 1984 benefit in Manhattan.Ron Galella Collection via Getty ImagesIf you dust off more of the structure’s past, you find the bones of New York. The brick building once housed mobsters and bare-knuckle boxers.It was built in the 1860s, architect unknown, and its first known use was as a stable, according to Village Preservation, an advocacy group. Great Jones Street, a two-block lane in NoHo named after the lawyer and politician Samuel Jones, was a home for the city’s affluent merchant class that counted the mayor and diarist Philip Hone among its early residents. During the Civil War, the 69th Regiment gathered on the street to march toward a steamer on the Hudson. Crowds looked on as the young men headed off to battle.As Manhattan grew and wealthy residents moved uptown, the neighborhood began its slump into a skid row. At the east end of Great Jones Street lay the Bowery, a once-reputable boulevard that had become a notorious thoroughfare lined with brothels, beer gardens, flophouses and pawn shops.An 1897 map of Great Jones Street, which was named after Samuel Jones, a New York lawyer and politician.Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, New York Public LibraryThe Bowery of old.The building became a saloon and dance hall, the Brighton, which The New York Times called a “notorious dive.” The place was nearly blown to smithereens in 1901 after some men making a beer delivery disturbed a gas jet in the cellar. When the establishment’s owner, Charles Deveniude, went to investigate, he lit a candle. The explosion was heard “several blocks away,” The Times reported, and Mr. Deveniude suffered burns to his face, hands and shoulders.The Brighton was sold a few years later to Paul Kelly, whom The Times described in a 1912 article as “perhaps the most successful and the most influential gangster in New York history.” In a nod to his Italian heritage, Mr. Kelly, a onetime pugilist born Paolo Antonio Vaccarelli, renamed the saloon Little Naples.Mr. Kelly ran the Five Points Gang, one of the most feared street gangs of its day, and Little Naples served as his association’s headquarters and as a gathering place for the city’s political elite. He was an enforcer for the corrupt Democratic political machine, Tammany Hall, and his henchmen helped provide paid voters, known as “floaters,” to cast ballots for Tammany candidates. The gang’s members included future underworld leaders like Lucky Luciano and Al Capone.A 1905 article in The Times recounted a “desperate fight” at Little Naples in which a man was killed and several others were wounded. “Scores of shots were fired, but as far as is known to the police, only one man went to his death,” the paper reported, adding: “His body was found in the saloon nearly half an hour after the smoke of the battle had cleared away. There was a bullet wound in his left breast.” The man was discovered with his legs protruding from a swinging bathroom door. His dog, a spaniel, was whimpering beside him.The Times further reported that one of Mr. Kelly’s lieutenants, John Ratta, was wounded in another shootout at the saloon that same week. He refused to cooperate with the police, saying only that he “slipped and fell so hard on a bullet on the floor that it entered his flesh.” The Times noted: “Ratta will live to carry a revolver, and he says he will settle the difficulty in his own way.”The June 9, 1912, edition of The New York Times included a detailed report on the murderous goings-on at Little Naples, a night spot that once occupied the Atelier Jolie building.The New York TimesIn later decades, the building housed metalwork and kitchen equipment supply businesses. Don DeLillo wrote Great Jones Street into the annals of American literature in 1973, when he named his third novel after the street. The book’s narrator-protagonist, a disillusioned rock star, Bucky Wunderlick, slums it in an apartment there: “I went to the room in Great Jones Street, a small crooked room, cold as a penny, looking out on warehouses, trucks and rubble.”Mr. Warhol purchased 57 Great Jones Street in 1970 under the corporation name Factory Films Inc., according to a report by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. In 1983, as he became a mentor to Mr. Basquiat, who was then a fast-rising art world star, Mr. Warhol rented the upstairs loft to him. In the next few years Mr. Basquiat produced works including “King Zulu” and “Riding With Death.”“Jean-Michel called,” Mr. Warhol wrote in his diary on Sept. 5, 1983. “He’s afraid he’s just going to be a flash in the pan. And I told him not to worry, that he wouldn’t be. But then I got scared because he’s rented our building on Great Jones and what if he is a flash in the pan and doesn’t have the money to pay his rent?”After Mr. Basquiat’s death, the building’s exterior became a mecca for street artists to leave tributes to him, and the site has been marked with renditions of his crown motif and “SAMO” graffiti tag ever since.The Warhol estate sold the building in the early 1990s. After that, as the gentrification of the neighborhood accelerated, and nightlife hot spots like B Bar and the Bowery Hotel thrived, a referral-only Japanese restaurant with no listed phone number, Bohemian, occupied the address. It was concealed, speakeasy-style, behind a butcher shop.In 2022, the building was put on the rental market by Meridian Capital Group for $60,000 a month. Its landlord, according to property records, is the noted real estate appraiser Robert Von Ancken, whose services have been used by New York real estate families including the Trumps, the Helmsleys and the Zeckendorfs. Reached by phone, Mr. Von Ancken clarified that he had bought the building with his business partner, Leslie Garfield, who died last year, and that he now owns the property with Mr. Garfield’s family.“When we first occupied the space, we didn’t really know much about the artist who’d been living there, because he wasn’t as well known then,” Mr. Von Ancken recalled. “There were all these drawings on the walls. We rented it as it was. A tenant painted all over it. That was all lost.”He added: “The building has been getting graffitied over for years. I’ve tried repainting the front, but I eventually gave up. It’s clearly still very important for young artists, even today, to put their mark on that facade.”About a year ago, Ms. Jolie and her teenage daughter Zahara started scouting for a downtown retail space, and their wanderings brought them to 57 Great Jones. They felt an immediate communion with the building, Ms. Jolie said in an interview with Vogue, so she quickly rented it. As the store approached its opening date, one of her sons, Pax, helped spray-paint the Atelier Jolie logo onto a canvas draping the doorway.Angelina Jolie, the latest tenant of 57 Great Jones Street, outside the building in August.Mega/GC Images, via Getty ImagesOne recent night, a security guard manned Atelier Jolie’s entranceway while two young employees explained the shop’s mission of promoting sustainable fashion to a visitor. Upstairs, in the same space that the Five Points Gang used as a meeting place, another employee worked on a laptop in the fitting room.Outside, a couple stopped to read the plaque that memorialized Mr. Basquiat’s residence at the address and noted its early use as a stable. Then they reminded each other that they were running late for a hard-to-get dinner reservation at a nearby restaurant. More

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      ‘The Collaboration’ Review: A Basquiat-Warhol Bromance in Bloom

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      Anthony McCarten’s biodrama about the artists’ work together lifts the curtain on their friendship, or at least it thinks it does.On the cover of the press script of “The Collaboration,” Anthony McCarten’s new bioplay about the Pop Art superstar Andy Warhol and the Neo-Expressionist phenom Jean-Michel Basquiat, the pair pose in Everlast boxing gloves and shorts, as if preparing to go 12 rounds with each other.It’s one of a series of promotional shots for a 1985 exhibit of 16 paintings that they made together, and surely one element of the photo’s endurance as a crystallizing image is that neither artist lived much longer. Warhol died at 58 in 1987 after gallbladder surgery, and Basquiat at just 27 in 1988, after a heroin overdose.Don’t judge a play by its cover and all that, but in this case, you wouldn’t be far off. “The Collaboration,” starring Paul Bettany as Warhol and a radiant Jeremy Pope as Basquiat, is fundamentally invested in pitting the two painters against each other: their styles, their philosophies, their musings on art and commerce. And their fluctuating cultural currency.Presented by Manhattan Theater Club and the Young Vic Theater, this transfer from London — whose opening night performance at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater was canceled on Tuesday because of a positive Covid case in the company — is considerably less curious about whatever lies behind each man’s public facade. But Kwame Kwei-Armah’s production would like you to think it’s lifting the curtain on exactly that as it tells the early-80s New York story of Warhol and Basquiat’s work on those 16 canvases, and the friendship that took root between them.“I am human, even if I don’t look it,” Warhol says in the opening scene, getting right to the crux of biodrama and its perennial appeal to audiences: the sense that it gives us an intimate, up-close glimpse at a public figure’s private life, with its complex messiness and struggle, inspiration and joy.All the better, naturally, if that public figure is played by a famous actor — like Bettany, so comically endearing last year as Vision in the Avengers television spinoff “WandaVision,” and so deeply creepy as the sociopathic Duke of Argyll in the mini-series “A Very British Scandal.”There is a frisson of celebrity in the air, then, when we first see Bettany as Warhol, peering at some Basquiat paintings at their art dealer’s gallery, looking displeased — and grumpier still when he hears that this 20-something commands higher prices than he does.So it’s rather lovely that Pope, a rising star, bests him as Basquiat. Not that this is a competition, let alone a boxing match. But if “The Collaboration” spurs you to spend time with paintings made by one of these artists, it’s going to be Basquiat.Pope summons not only his charm — a magnet for women, Basquiat dated Madonna — but also his brilliance, ache and depth. His paintings are layered and full, textured and emphatic; so is Pope’s performance. With his heart-melting dimpled smile, he plays the frenetic former graffiti artist as if he knows every pulse of Basquiat’s life that we don’t see onstage, and that McCarten’s blunt instrument of a script can’t convey.Bettany, though, barely locates more than two dimensions in Warhol, as if the task were to play an icon, not a human being. That could be deliberate. Funny, frail, effete, Bettany’s Warhol is as meticulously impersonal as his art, and my goodness he whines. And he does so in the particular way of characters who need to get some exposition out.Krysta Rodriguez as Maya, Basquiat’s girlfriend, with Bettany and Pope. The show covers the period Warhol and Basquiat created 16 paintings for a 1985 exhibit.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I’ve never been the same since she shot me,” Warhol says, apropos of almost nothing in the first minutes of the play, referring to Valerie Solanas, whose 1968 attack nearly killed him. He mentions her several more times during the show, not terribly organically. And yet somehow, when Warhol at last nervously takes his shirt off in front of Basquiat, revealing his scarred and corseted torso, he has none of the vulnerability that Alice Neel captured in her poignant bare-chested portrait of Warhol — which you’d think he might have, live.For all the slenderness of McCarten’s script, it does feel padded, and even so it manages to skip from Warhol and Basquiat’s wary acquaintanceship at the end of Act I straight to an apparently solid friendship at the top of Act II. When their art dealer, Bruno Bischofberger (a wonderfully vivid Erik Jensen), finds a syringe in Basquiat’s couch, he asks Warhol to confront him.“You two are so close now,” Bruno says — which is news to the audience, especially anyone who might have popped out to the restroom at intermission instead of watching the wordless bromance video montage that played throughout, showing them learning to have fun together in the studio. (Projection design is by Duncan McLean.)Oddly, given how specific McCarten’s script is about the kind of period technology that Warhol uses when he films, the video the audience sees of them looks distractingly contemporary. But Anna Fleischle’s set is clever, particularly the large panel that hangs overhead, appearing sometimes like a skylight, sometimes like a Mondrian.McCarten, who made his Broadway debut this month as the book writer of “A Beautiful Noise, The Neil Diamond Musical,” knows the biodrama genre better than most. He built his career as the screenwriter of the movies “The Theory of Everything” (2014), about Stephen Hawking’s first marriage; “Darkest Hour” (2017), about Winston Churchill’s high-stakes start to leading Britain; “Bohemian Rhapsody” (2018), about the Queen frontman Freddie Mercury; and “The Two Popes” (2020), about Pope Francis and his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI. McCarten’s Whitney Houston biopic, “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” is due out Friday, and a film adaptation of “The Collaboration” is in the wings.Onstage, though, “The Collaboration” feels emptily formulaic — less like an insider’s view of its famous subjects’ lives than a kind of biographical tourism that gets into serious gawking in its second half. It doesn’t bring us any insight into whatever closeness Warhol and Basquiat had.If a sense of these artists’ relationship is what you’re looking for, try the extensive, palpably personal exhibition “Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure,” organized by his sisters and on view through Jan. 1 at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. There are touches of Warhol in it — mementos of the two men’s friendship, and of their creative kinship — and they’re very sweet.The CollaborationThrough Jan. 29 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, Manhattan; manhattantheaterclub.com. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      ‘The Collaboration,’ About Warhol and Basquiat, Plans Broadway Bow

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      The play, by Anthony McCarten, will be presented this fall by the Manhattan Theater Club, following a run earlier this year at the Young Vic in London.“The Collaboration,” a new play exploring the relationship between the painters Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, will transfer to Broadway this fall.Manhattan Theater Club, a nonprofit that operates the Samuel J. Friedman Theater on Broadway, said it would partner with the Young Vic Theater in London to present the play at the Friedman, with previews beginning Nov. 29 and an opening night scheduled for Dec. 20.The play was written by Anthony McCarten, from New Zealand, who is best known for his biographical screenplays, including the Oscar-nominated “The Theory of Everything” and “The Two Popes,” as well as “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Darkest Hour.” If all goes according to plan, “The Collaboration” will be the second work by McCarten to make it to Broadway, but just barely; he has also written the book for “A Beautiful Noise,” a biographical musical about Neil Diamond that is running in Boston and is scheduled to start previews on Broadway on Nov. 2.“The Collaboration” is to star Paul Bettany (best known for playing Vision in several Marvel projects) as Warhol and Jeremy Pope (who scored two Tony nominations in a single season, for “Ain’t Too Proud” and “Choir Boy”) as Basquiat. The two are expected to reprise their roles in a film adaptation.The play (as well as the forthcoming movie) is directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah, the artistic director of the Young Vic, where it had its premiere production this year. It opened to mixed reviews, but both actors won praise for their performances, which Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, deemed “bravura.”The play is set in 1984, when Warhol and Basquiat were working together. They both died later that decade.“The Collaboration” is the second play slated to be presented on Broadway by Manhattan Theater Club this season; it is scheduled to follow closely after “Cost of Living,” by Martyna Majok, which is expected to open at the Friedman in early October. More

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      Diego Cortez, a Scene Shaper in Art and Music, Dies at 74

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      In ’70s and ’80s New York, he elevated Jean-Michel Basquiat in a huge show he curated, helped found the Mudd Club and worked with Patti Smith and Laurie Anderson.Diego Cortez, an influential figure in New York City’s Downtown art and music scenes who in 1981 curated a massive exhibition featuring dozens of artists that brought the 20-year-old Jean-Michel Basquiat to public renown, died on Monday in Burlington, N.C. He was 74.The cause was kidney failure, his sister, Kathy Hudson, said. He died in hospice care at her house but had been living nearby in Saxapahaw.Mr. Cortez seemed to be everywhere in SoHo, Tribeca and beyond in the late 1970s and early ’80s. He was a founder of the Mudd Club, a gritty, boundary-pushing nightclub that opened in 1978. He performed with Laurie Anderson and Kathy Acker; directed music videos for Blondie and the Talking Heads; mounted shows of drawings and photographs by the rock singer-songwriter Patti Smith; and wrote “Private Elvis,” a book with photographs of Presley’s time in the Army that Mr. Cortez found in West Germany.Then came the “New York/New Wave” show in 1981. Held at the cutting-edge P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS 1) in Long Island City, Queens, the exhibition demonstrated Mr. Cortez’s eclectic knowledge of the visual and musical worlds that he’d been immersed in since he moved to New York City.He recruited more than 100 artists for the show, among them Ms. Acker, Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, David Byrne, William Burroughs, Futura 2000, Ann Magnuson, Fab 5 Freddy and Basquiat, whom he had met on the dance floor of the Mudd Club.“It was huge — literally 600 to 700 works of art that took three weeks to install, using two installation crews,” Alana Heiss, the founder of P.S. 1, said by phone. “He was very persuasive: we started with one group of galleries on the first floor and ended up on two floors.”“Diego was full of unquenchable passion,” she said.Curt Hoppe, a photorealist painter whose work was in the exhibition, recalled: “He brought uptown and downtown together, graffiti and downtown artists, and he hung it in an unusual way, splattering everything on the walls. It was a riveting show.”He added, “Diego was the epitome of cool.”Mr. Cortez recruited more than 100 artists for “New York/New Wave,” a 1981 show at what is now the exhibition space MoMA PS 1 in Queens. The show brought wide renown to Jean-Michel Basquiat in particular.MoMA PS1 ArchivesIn a maximalist show that Mr. Cortez packed with existing and future stars, Basquiat was introduced to a wider world. Known first for his graffiti art, he had morphed into a painter who incorporated images of angular people and symbols with words and phrases. The show, for which Basquiat created about 20 new works, brought him to the attention of dealers. By the time he died in 1988 at 27, he was a superstar.“What makes this work is the intensity of the line,” Mr. Cortez said in 2017 when the Basquiat portion of “New York/New Wave” was partly restaged at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. “Jean-Michel was really more of a drawer. It keeps that innocent aspect, that childish aspect that’s important, because it’s slightly not adult.”Mr. Cortez remained linked to Basquiat long after the P.S. 1 exhibition. He curated a few more shows of his work; advised his estate and served on its authentication committee; acted as a consultant to Julian Schnabel when Mr. Schnabel made the film “Basquiat” (1996); and played a bit part as what the credits called a “fist-fighter at the Mudd Club” in “Downtown 81,” another film about Basquiat, from 2001.Mr. Cortez stood before a painting of him by the photorealist painter Curt Hoppe. “Diego was full of unquenchable passion,” a colleague said.Curt HoppeJames Allan Curtis was born on Sept. 30, 1946 in Geneva, Ill., and grew up nearby in Wheaton. His father, Allan, was a warehouse manager for a steel company, and his mother, Jean (Ham) Curtis, was a manicurist.After graduating from Illinois State University with a bachelor’s degree, he earned a master’s degree in 1973 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied film, video and performance art. His teachers included the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage and the video artist Nam June Paik.He changed his name to Diego Cortez before moving to New York City in 1973, adopting it as an artistic pseudonym and as a reflection of the Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago where he had lived.Once in New York, he worked as a studio assistant to the conceptual artist Dennis Oppenheim and then to the video and performance artist Vito Acconci. Over the next few years, as he became further enmeshed in the Downtown music and art worlds, he held a variety of jobs, including one as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art. The job inspired Ms. Anderson in 1977 to release “Time to Go (For Diego),” a song that tells how Mr. Cortez, working the late shift, would tell people when it was time to leave:Or, as he put it, snap them out of their … art trances.People who had been standing in front of one thing for hours.He would jump in front of them and snap his fingers.And he’d say, “Time to go.”Mr. Cortez’s career after “New York/New Wave” was multifaceted, but he never organized another enormous exhibition like that one. He was an occasional agent and curator; collaborated on projects with his friend Brian Eno, the innovative musician and producer; and served as an art adviser to the Luciano Benetton and Frederik Roos collections. He composed an album, “Traumdetung” (2014), a mix of music and his snoring. And at one point he tried, unsuccessfully, to start a museum in Puerto Rico.Laurie Anderson and Mr. Cortez at a benefit in New York City in 2013. She was inspired to base a song on one of his early jobs in New York, as a museum security guard.Cindy Ord/Getty Images“His main goal was to to support artists by having collectors buy their work or to get their work into museums,” said his sister Ms. Hudson, who organized exhibitions with her brother at the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University, where she worked.In addition to her, Mr. Cortez is survived by another sister, Carol Baum, and a brother, Daniel Curtis.Patti Smith, in a phone interview, said she first got to know Mr. Cortez in the 1970s. He later urged her to resume working on her visual art, which she had largely stopped pursuing during a long hiatus from public life. “He was a bridge to helping me get my feet back on the ground,” she said.He helped curate a show of her drawings and photos at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2002 and an exhibition of her photos in 2010 at the New Orleans Museum of Art, where he was the curator of photography at the time.“He didn’t like to stand in other people’s light,” Ms. Smith said. “He wanted Basquiat to stand on his own. He wanted me to stand on my own at my exhibition in New Orleans. He was really interested in seeing people he thought had promise flower.” More

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      Keith Haring’s Refrigerator Door Is on the Auction Block

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      A graffiti-tagged refrigerator door served as the artist’s guest register for Madonna, Angel Ortiz and more. Now it’s on the auction block at Guernsey’s.It began life began as a white refrigerator door in an apartment in SoHo, but by the 1990s, it was anything but plain. It was covered with the graffiti tags and wide-marker signatures of the famous friends of the tenant in the apartment. “Madonna Loves Keith,” read one inscription.Yes, that Madonna. The tenant was the artist Keith Haring, a star of the SoHo art scene, who partied with Andy Warhol and graffiti artists like LA II (whose real name is Angel Ortiz) and Fab Five Freddy (Fred Brathwaite), both of whom signed the refrigerator. Also on the door are the letters JM, which the auctioneer Arlan Ettinger, in an interview, speculated had belonged to Jean-Michel Basquiat, the downtown artist who became a megawatt celebrity. (Ettinger said he had tried to verify the Basquiat signature but that “there’s no way of absolutely confirming” it’s his writing or not.)Ettinger, who will sell the refrigerator door on Wednesday at Guernsey’s, said the door served as Haring’s guest register. “It seemed like everybody who was anybody showed up there,” he said, “and you signed in on that refrigerator door. It’s not beautiful, but it’s of that moment, of that time. It reflects a certain spirit, a creativeness, that is alive today if you think about the people who were there — Madonna, and a long, long list of artists.”Ettinger said the owner, a yoga instructor in California, had insisted on privacy, so much so that he said he did not even know her name. He said his contract to sell the door was with a friend of the owner who forwarded an email describing how the owner had found the apartment on Broome Street — she saw an ad for a “spacious railroad apartment” in The Village Voice in 1990. It came with “this amazing refrigerator covered with the graffiti of the Haring era.” The walls had once been covered, too, but she said that the landlord had repainted them.She returned home one sweltering day to learn that the refrigerator had conked out and was removed; the delivery men had left it on the street to be picked up with the garbage.“I raced outside,” the email said. “There, in the back alley, was our old friend, the Haring fridge, lying on its side. The door slipped off the body of the fridge easily. I brought it upstairs while my roommate retrieved the smaller top freezer door.”In 1993, when she moved to California, she carted the door to her parents’ home in Washington, and stored it in their attic, where it stayed until about 2010, when her mother shipped it to her.Andy Warhol, whose signature is also on the refrigerator door, figures in another item in the auction: A moose head he owned. The auction will be conducted online through Liveauctioneers.com and Invaluable.com, and by telephone from Guernsey’s. Ettinger’s estimate for the refrigerator door is “in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.” More