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Lot Essay
'Tre Amici', or 'Three Friends', is from a series of collaborative works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente and Andy Warhol, orchestrated in 1984 by the art dealer Bruno Bischofberger. While making these works together, the three protagonists spontaneously accepted the rules established by Bischofberger: each artist was to begin four works, the size and medium of which they could determine themselves; the works were then passed around until each artist has successively worked on each piece. In addition, they each also started one drawing, so that, in the end, they had participated, without contacting each other, in the making of fifteen pieces. "Tre Amici", one of these three drawings, was begun by Clemente, continued by Basquiat, and then completed by Warhol.
Clemente spread across the surface of the blank paper his distinguishable idiosyncratic marks which he calls 'ideograms'. These pictographic symbols mix together different cultural traditions in a conscious slipstream between language and image. Here, the formless body of a suffering being drifts in an imaginary ocean and calls to mind phallic characters of antiquity or Surrealist paintings.
Basquiat reacted to Clemente's mystical vocabulary by enhancing it with his distinctive spontaneous iconography: here, two shattered fragments of reality that harshly suggest cave painting - a mummy and a swordfish.
The two messages that seem to contradict each other are in fact complementary: Basquiat's numerous signs become mysterious under the influence of Clemente's vocabulary, and at the same time the Italian artist's shamanistic imagery becomes more rooted in reality through Basquiat's urban realism.
In his final intervention, Warhol used his characteristic silkscreen process and turned the work into a diptych. Feigning to remove himself from the creative effort, he multiplied the two other's input and revealed the making of the work, the essence of the collaboration. Warhol, the paternalistic and emblematic figure, literally acknowledged here the talent of his young companions.
The collaborative process of the three artists is actually quite similar to the Surrealists' favourite game of 'Exquisite Corpses', a blind collaboration whereby artists and poets executed various parts of a work without being permitted to see the contribution of the others until the completion of the piece.
Clemente spread across the surface of the blank paper his distinguishable idiosyncratic marks which he calls 'ideograms'. These pictographic symbols mix together different cultural traditions in a conscious slipstream between language and image. Here, the formless body of a suffering being drifts in an imaginary ocean and calls to mind phallic characters of antiquity or Surrealist paintings.
Basquiat reacted to Clemente's mystical vocabulary by enhancing it with his distinctive spontaneous iconography: here, two shattered fragments of reality that harshly suggest cave painting - a mummy and a swordfish.
The two messages that seem to contradict each other are in fact complementary: Basquiat's numerous signs become mysterious under the influence of Clemente's vocabulary, and at the same time the Italian artist's shamanistic imagery becomes more rooted in reality through Basquiat's urban realism.
In his final intervention, Warhol used his characteristic silkscreen process and turned the work into a diptych. Feigning to remove himself from the creative effort, he multiplied the two other's input and revealed the making of the work, the essence of the collaboration. Warhol, the paternalistic and emblematic figure, literally acknowledged here the talent of his young companions.
The collaborative process of the three artists is actually quite similar to the Surrealists' favourite game of 'Exquisite Corpses', a blind collaboration whereby artists and poets executed various parts of a work without being permitted to see the contribution of the others until the completion of the piece.