Graffiti Jean-Michel Basquiat by Eme Freethinker/Pen_Chill in Mauerpark in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, Germany
Jean-Michel Basquiat has been dead for thirty-eight years and he still gets flattened into the same three images: the crown, the skull, the heroin. Add a fourth for the art-market version — the $110 million auction hammer. Less discussed is the fact that the most successful Black painter of the twentieth century spent his teenage years hustling on the streets of downtown Manhattan, some of it reportedly with men, and that his defining artistic relationship was with a gay man who was, by his own diary’s admission, at least a little in love with him.
That context rarely makes it onto a museum wall label. It’s worth laying out properly.
When HIV/AIDS wiped out an entire generation of artists and creators, Basquiat’s work remains key cultural and artistic pieces from the 1980s.
An under-documented bisexuality
The record here is thin. Tamra Davis’s 2010 documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child — made by a friend of his — barely touches his sexuality at all, and a Philadelphia Gay News review at the time noted how carefully the film skirted his rumored bisexuality and his relationships with men, even while covering his affair with Madonna in some detail.
The person who put more of it on record was Phoebe Hoban, in her 1998 biography Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art. Drawing on interviews with people who knew him, Hoban wrote that Basquiat had several relationships with men over the years and wasn’t especially secretive about them — a claim Xtra Magazine revisited decades later, noting that his bisexuality gets mentioned only occasionally next to the endless inventory of his girlfriends. Other, looser accounts go further still, describing his earliest sexual experiences as being with men and placing him, as a teenage runaway, in the world of gay street hustling before he ever picked up a paintbrush. Some of that sits closer to well-worn scene lore than to verified biography, since Basquiat gave almost no interviews about his private life and died before anyone pressed him on it directly.
Better documented is the scene he came up in. Keith Haring, openly gay and part of the same 1980 Times Square Show that gave Basquiat his first real exposure, was a friend and occasional rival. The East Village art world of Club 57, the Mudd Club, and Fun Gallery was built largely by and for queer artists, and Basquiat moved through it as an insider rather than a visitor passing through.
Warhol: mentor, collaborator, something else
The relationship that shaped his career most directly was with Andy Warhol, who was, per the Warhol Museum’s own account, open about his queerness for decades — from his early homoerotic Boy Book drawings through his 1980s self-portraits in drag.
They met in 1980, when a 19-year-old Basquiat sold Warhol a hand-painted postcard outside a restaurant. Two years later they were formally introduced and photographed together, and Basquiat reportedly painted a double portrait of the two of them within hours of that meeting. What followed was a five-year friendship and, eventually, a working collaboration that neither man ever quite explained in ordinary terms.
Whether it was romantic remains an open question. People close to both men have circled around it for decades without landing anywhere solid. Basquiat’s girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk described feeling like a third wheel in the Basquiat-Warhol relationship. One writer who went through Warhol’s diaries came away convinced Warhol had a genuine crush on the younger artist. Warhol became Basquiat’s landlord, worried over his drug use, and photographed him constantly. None of that settles anything on its own — mentorship and infatuation can look similar from a distance — but the ambiguity itself seems to have registered with the people around them at the time.
By 1984 the two were secretly making paintings together, passing canvases back and forth, each altering what the other had started. It produced some of the strangest, most alive work either of them made, and also a fair amount of tension. When sixteen of the collaborative paintings went up at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in September 1985, New York Times critic Vivien Raynor panned the show, describing the pairing as one of Warhol’s manipulations and reducing Basquiat to an accessory — the word “mascot” followed him afterward. Warhol wrote in his diary that he apologized for it; Basquiat, at least publicly, said it hadn’t bothered him. He stopped showing up to paint at the Factory not long after. Whatever the relationship had been, it didn’t survive being reduced to a punchline in print.
Warhol died in February 1987, following complications from what should have been routine gallbladder surgery. Basquiat, by most accounts, never fully recovered from the loss. He died himself eighteen months later, of a heroin overdose, at twenty-seven, and is buried at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, a few plots from Leonard Bernstein.
Where the work lives now
| Work | Year | Where it lives now |
|---|---|---|
| Untitled (skull self-portrait) | 1981 | The Broad, Los Angeles |
| Dos Cabezas (double portrait with Warhol) | 1982 | Private collection |
| Six Crimee | 1982 | Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles |
| Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump | 1982 | Private collection (shown at the Hirshhorn, Washington D.C., 2022) |
| Untitled (the record-breaking skull painting) | 1982 | Private collection (Yusaku Maezawa), on long-term loan and touring — most recently linked to the Brooklyn Museum and Seattle Art Museum |
| Notary | 1983 | Princeton University Art Museum (Schorr Family Collection loan) |
| Hollywood Africans | 1983 | Whitney Museum of American Art, New York |
| Ten Punching Bags (Last Supper) (with Warhol) | 1985–86 | The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh |
| King Zulu | 1986 | Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) |
| Self Portrait | 1986 | Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) |
This is a fraction of his output. Basquiat worked fast and constantly, and most of what he made sits in private collections rather than public galleries, a pattern shaped more by speculative buyers than by any museum’s curatorial preference. The Broad in Los Angeles and MACBA in Barcelona are reliable options for seeing several pieces in one place without a private vault appointment.
A fuller picture
The standard version of Basquiat’s story is a genius who died too young, and that much holds up. Less visible in that version is a young artist who came up in spaces largely built by queer people, whose own sexuality was fluid enough that biographers have handled it inconsistently, and whose most significant artistic partnership was with a gay man whose feelings toward him were never fully settled, even by Warhol’s own account. None of that needs resolving to be worth knowing. The uncertainty is arguably closer to the truth of it than any tidier version would be.
Sources
- Philadelphia Gay News — “Film remembers ‘Radiant Child'”
- Xtra Magazine — “Jean-Michel Basquiat shakes it up”
- The Andy Warhol Museum — LGBTQ+
- Whitney Museum of American Art — Jean-Michel Basquiat
- MyArtBroker — Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol: An Unlikely Pair
- Jack Shainman Gallery — Basquiat X Warhol
- MyArtBroker — Where to See Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Most Famous Artworks
- Studio International — Basquiat, Brooklyn Museum, New York
- Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden — Basquiat × Banksy
- Artnet News — Here Are Basquiat’s 5 Most Expensive Artworks Ever
- Phoebe Hoban, Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art (Viking, 1998)
