“I don’t think he meant technically, I think he meant his manager Fred Hughes or his gallerist would always have some sort of a commission for him that he had to complete,” Condo reasons. “The whole collaboration with Basquiat, Warhol created his work out of a consumer culture. And Jean-Michel came in and smashed it apart and did his own anti-consumerism. Andy would throw up a Chevron logo and Jean-Michel would just paint right over it. And so that’s where the whole boxing club thing is. You got this culture clash – consume, Chevron, GE, Arm & Hammer, and on top of that you have a painter who paints whatever comes to his mind.”
Condo has enjoyed an enviable career, collaborating with icons like William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and pop stars like Kanye. His work is collected by numerous celebrities, with his top price at auction being roughly $6.9 million for “Force Field” (2010). But the early days, hopeful and ultimately heartbreaking, stay with him.
“Living through those dark times in Paris in the late eighties when Jean-Michel died of an overdose, Andy died in the hospital, and Keith had already contracted AIDS and it was just a ticking time bomb when he was going to lose consciousness and die; it was just really dark. And most of the paintings that I did during that period were extremely dark and haven’t really been seen by the art world.”
His hope is that they’ll be included in a 2025 retrospective of his work at Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, especially “Black Rain Over New York”, currently in the Bischofberger Collection in Zurich.
“That was separate drawings that Keith and I were looking at, some that were caricatures of Keith, and we were cracking up while doing them,” he recalls. “And when he died it was so sad. I did the whole painting. And where it was all dark, black dripping rain, I stuck each one of these drawings randomly onto the canvas. I’d like to see if we can borrow that for the retrospective.”