What would artist Jean-Michele Basquiat have achieved had he not died of a heroin overdose at the age of 27? It's a moot question, but very much one that hangs over “The Collaboration,” an interesting new Broadway play by Anthony McCarten.
A moot question, for sure, but very much one that hangs over “The Collaboration,” the interesting new Broadway play by the prolific Anthony McCarten, capably directed by Kwame Kwei-Armah, and staged by the Manhattan Theatre Club.That’s mostly because the actor Jeremy Pope depicts the neo-expressionist artist, a genius who was part of the Whitney Biennial at 22 years old and whose paintings now sell for hundreds of millions, with such tenderness and empathy.
The two artists, who died in strikingly close proximity to each other, had become good friends in the 1980s, with Warhol becoming Basquiat’s landlord and, on some strange level, his designated adult. Warhol wrote often about Basquiat in his diaries and the two partied with Mick Jagger and his ilk in the downtown scene. When Basquiat woke up to the reality of the morning, it was either his girlfriend or often Warhol who opened the curtains.
Therein, McCarten gets to debate attacks on artistic freedom, the importance of allowing artists to do what they feel called to do, not what is politically correct, and the close relationship between great art and unchecked impulses. It’s a not-so-veiled attack on Broadway censoriousness and racially charged reductivism — and fair enough.
Fair enough, again. After all, the actual Warhol-Basquiat collaboration came at the behest of Bruno Bischofberger , a self-interested Swiss art dealer and Warhol, of course, was famously interested in advertising, branding and industrial design. That allows McCarten to explore the various arguments for intersecting with stuff designed primarily to make money.
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