Jean-Michel Basquiat Still Rising on Streets & at Auctions

The recent street naming in honor of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat has brought to light a torn-up photocopy of a rental lease, published here for the first time, between Basquiat and Andy Warhol.

In late October, New York City Council co-named the block on Great Jones Street between Bowery and Lafayette “Jean-Michel Basquiat Way.” I stumbled upon the ceremony by accident on a walk from the West to the East Village.

I saw a crowd of spectators and reporters gathering in front of 57 Great Jones St. and thought the actress Angelina Jolie might be hosting an event. She bought the building in 2023 and turned it into the Atelier Jolie, a self-described “creative hub” for artists, fashion designers and fabric makers. But the crowd was not waiting for Jolie. The news cameras were getting ready for city officials to unveil Basquiat’s new street sign.

Basquiat spent the last years of his life living and working on Great Jones Street. Born in Brooklyn in 1960 to a Puerto Rican mother and Haitian father, he dropped out of school, ran away from home at age 17, and began spray-painting the tag SAMO© (Same Old Crap) and other satirical and poetic phrases around the streets of Lower Manhattan with his friend Al Diaz. When he moved into 57 Great Jones St. in 1983, he was no longer a street kid, but at the peak of an explosive career in the art world.

His landlord was Andy Warhol, whose enterprise had bought the two-story carriage house in Downtown Manhattan in the 1970s. Their five-year rental agreement is dated Aug. 30, 1983. Basquiat, who was 22 years old at the time, agreed to pay $4,000 a month, or $48,000 a year, as the lease indicates.

No one knows, the archivist at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh told me over the phone, why the photocopied lease is ripped in half. It was in Warhol’s possession when he died, and gifted to the Warhol Museum by his estate. It is now part of the museum’s permanent collection.

The mysterious tear reflects the tumultuous relationship between the two great painters, who collaborated on about 160 paintings and were close friends until their break-up in 1985.

In The Andy Warhol Diaries, edited by Pat Hackett, Warhol, who was 32 years older, expressed concerns about Basquiat’s being able to pay the rent.

“He is going to rent the carriage house we own on 57 Great Jones Street,” Warhol noted on Friday, Aug. 26, 1983. “So Benjamin [Warhol’s last assistant] went over to get the lease and I hope it works out. Jean Michel is trying to get on a regular daily painting schedule. If he doesn’t and he can’t pay his rent it’ll be hard to evict him. It’s always hard to get people out.”

On Monday, Sept. 5, 1983, Warhol mentioned it again: “Labor Day. Jean Michel called, he wanted some philosophy, he came over and we talked, and 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 money to pay his rent. . . ?”

Warhol’s diary states that the Swiss gallerist Bruno Bischofberger paid Basquiat’s first month’s rent and security deposit. Bischofberger had officially introduced the two painters in 1982, though Warhol had met Basquiat years earlier, “when he used to sit on the sidewalk in Greenwich Village and paint T-shirts.” Warhol added in his diary that he would give him “$10 here and there.”

Bischofberger wanted Warhol, Basquiat, and the Italian painter Francesco Clemente to collaborate, but Warhol and Basquiat were so inspired by each other that they soon began working as a duo. Sadly, the 1985 exhibition of their joint paintings received terrible reviews. The New York Times dismissed the works as “one of Warhol’s manipulations” and referred to Basquiat as an “art world mascot,” a comment that deeply offended him. One month after the exhibition closed, Basquiat stopped calling Warhol. “Jean Michel hasn’t called me in a month,” Warhol noted in November 1985, “so I guess it’s really over.”

Basquiat was devastated when he heard of Warhol’s sudden death in February 1987. One year later, in August 1988, one month before his lease expired, Basquiat died on Great Jones Street from a drug overdose. He was 27 years old.

“Today, we honor a man whose art reflected life in all its complexity—the beauty, the struggle, the truth,” Council member Erik Bottcher said during the co-naming ceremony on Oct. 21, before he presented the official proclamation to Basquiat’s two sisters.

While other family members and city officials posed for pictures with the new street sign, a man, standing next to me, whispered, “You know, I admired his work. But I had no idea it was going to be so valuable.”

The 74-year-old local resident, Amir Bey, an artist and astrologer, remembered seeing Basquiat’s graffiti in the New York subways in the late 1970s.

“I liked how he used the three lines for the letter E,” Bey told me. “He got rid of the bar on the side and just used the three horizontal dashes. That became a universal thing.”

Basquiat had taken the symbol Bey was referring to from the “hobo code,” a language used by itinerant Americans who left their homes in search of food and lodging during the Great Depression. They used a system of symbols to warn one another about vicious dogs (a horizontal zigzag), armed homeowners (a triangle with hands), or active police officers.

Basquiat had a copy of Henry Dreyfuss’s book Symbol Sourcebook: An Authoritative Guide to International Graphic Symbols (1984) in his studio, and according to Dreyfuss, that particular E was a “hobo” symbol that meant, “This is not a safe place.”

Bey shook his head with regret. “Basquiat’s art was everywhere. One could just take it.”

In 1981, Basquiat sold his first painting, “Cadillac Moon,” to singer Debbie Harry for $200. Thirty-six years later, in 2017, one of his Untitled paintings sold at Sotheby’s for $110.5 million, placing it on the list of the most expensive paintings ever sold. Warhol is on that same list, but higher up, with “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn,” sold at Christie’s in 2022 for $195 million.

Basquiat was not the “flash in the pan,” as both he and Warhol had feared.

On Nov. 19, Basquiat’s “Crowns (Peso Neto)” from 1981 is slated to headline Sotheby’s contemporary evening sale in New York with a high estimate of $45 million.