On a cold January night in Paris’ 3rd arrondissement, Jean-Michel Basquiat met the Côte d’Ivoire-born painter Ouattara Watts at the Yvon Lambert Gallery. Coincidence proved essential: Their chance meeting in the winter of 1988 — at what turned out to be one of the final openings the sought-after graffiti maverick would attend — kicked off a brief but fertile friendship that lasted seven months, ending with the death of Basquiat in his Manhattan apartment from a heroin overdose at 27.
Works by the two have been brought together in “Jean-Michel Basquiat and Ouattara Watts: A Distant Conversation,” on view at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire through February 23.
The latest instalment of the Currier’s “Distant Conversations” series, the Basquiat/Watts reunion is made up of 13 pieces that span their careers: Basquiat from 1981 to his death; Watts, from the ‘80s to today.
It’s difficult to comprehend just how much work Basquiat was able to turn out before his death. That the works evolved at such a dizzying pace only gives credence to fellow tagger-turned-painter Keith Herring’s obituary of him: “He truly created a lifetime of works in ten years. Greedily, we wonder what else he might have created, what masterpieces we have been cheated out of by his death, but the fact is that he has created enough work to intrigue generations to come.”