Madonna, 1990
Patrick Demarchelier
Staley-Wise Gallery
The legend is a classic one: A 20-year-old Michigan college dropout lands in New York with $35 in her pocket and gets into a taxi for the first time in her life, telling the driver to drop her off at “the center of it all.”
Soon, the ambitious young Midwesterner would dye her hair blond and find herself at the center of the city’s creative scene. She would date Jean-Michel Basquiat, become close friends with Keith Haring, hang out with Larry Gagosian, collect Frida Kahlo works, and pose for Maripol. Somewhere along the way, she would also become the most famous singer in the world, known simply by her first name: Madonna.
On the eve of the 43rd Video Music Awards, where Madonna leads this year’s field with 11 nominations, Artsy looks back at the Queen of Pop’s unusually deep ties to the art world—and the artists, images, and ideas that have shaped her career.
A muse in the downtown scene
Madonna, NYC, 1980, 1980
Mick Rock
Avant Gallery
The center of it all during Madonna’s meteoric rise in the 1980s was her small but tightly knit downtown community. Living in a fifth-floor walk-up in Alphabet City, she quickly absorbed the neighborhood’s feverish creative output and became a fixture at now-legendary venues including Danceteria and the Roxy.
A Panel of Experts, 1982
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO)
It was within this milieu that perhaps the most valuable artwork featuring Madonna emerged, painted by her then-boyfriend Jean-Michel Basquiat. A Panel of Experts (1982), a largely black-and-white work in acrylic and oil pastel, bears Madonna’s name in its upper-left corner alongside that of Basquiat’s ex-girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk. At its center, two chunky figures appear to be fighting—an apparent reference to an altercation between the two women over Basquiat.
Now in the permanent collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the painting was reunited with its muse decades later when Madonna posed in front of it during its inclusion in the Barbican’s 2017 exhibition “Basquiat: Boom for Real.”
Making the Madonna image
Madonna (True Blue), 1986
Herb Ritts
CAMERA WORK
"Madonna at Window, NYC 1986", 1986
Herb Ritts
Izzy Gallery
If Madonna became one of the defining faces of 1980s pop culture, photographers and stylists helped fix that face in the collective imagination: ripped fishnets, heaps of bracelets, bleached hair, thick eyebrows, and a gaze that could turn provocation into a dare.
Her largely DIY style fascinated photographers including Herb Ritts and Patrick Demarchelier, but some of the era’s most intimate images came through the lens of Maripol, the French-born photographer, stylist, and downtown fixture who also helped construct the bridal-inflected look of Madonna’s Like a Virgin era.
Madonna (First Single), 1983
Maripol
Exploring the Arts Benefit Auction
A 2017 solo exhibition of Maripol’s work at Dundee Contemporary Arts captured Madonna on the brink of global takeover. The disarming Polaroids show an icon before the mythology had fully hardened: Madonna in bed in 1983; Madonna trying on a pink wig backstage in 1984. They are images of a superstar in formation.
The downtown language of street art
Eric Kroll - Madonna at Danceteria, NYC 1983 Memorial for Michael Stewart, 1983
Eric Kroll
Alpha 137 Gallery
Madonna also had unusually early access to graffiti and street art through her relationships with Basquiat and Haring. During the years when Haring was painting murals at era-defining nightclubs such as the Palladium and Danceteria, Madonna was performing at many of the same venues, trying to make early hits such as “Holiday” and “Everybody” heard.
When her first major nationwide concert run, the Virgin Tour, wrapped in 1985, she held its after-party at the Palladium, with her friend’s work looming in the background.
That friendship was inseparable from activism. As HIV/AIDS was met with intense stigma and governmental neglect, Madonna became an outspoken supporter of AIDS research and fundraising. She frequently appeared at benefit events alongside Haring and other members of their downtown circle, including Kenny Scharf.
Madonna, 2009
Mr. Brainwash
Rago/Wright/LAMA/Toomey & Co.
Keith Haring Andy Warhol record cover art (after Keith Haring Andy Warhol Madonna), ca. 1986
Keith Haring, Andy Warhol
Lot 180 Gallery
Decades later, she returned to the visual language of street art for the cover of her 2009 greatest-hits album Celebration, for which Mr. Brainwash transformed her image into a brightly colored, stencil-like portrait. The Pop palette inevitably evokes Andy Warhol, another figure in Madonna’s orbit and a guest at her 1985 wedding to Sean Penn.
Warhol and Haring even collaborated on a wedding gift for the couple: four works that transformed New York Post covers about the publication of Madonna’s nude photographs into playful Pop art artifacts. The tabloid image, already central to Madonna’s career, became an art object.
The collector behind the pop star
Madonna’s relationship with art was not confined to the people around her. Long before she could afford to collect it, she was looking.
As a teenager, she encountered Frida Kahlo through black-and-white photographs at the Detroit Institute of Arts. She later recalled walking past the museum’s Diego Rivera murals to look at images of Kahlo in her studio, captivated by the Mexican artist’s “self-possession and unique beauty.”
During her first month in New York, with money still scarce, Madonna spent part of her budget on a postcard of Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Monkey (1940), which she came to regard as a kind of “guardian angel.”
Frida Kahlo, 1931
Imogen Cunningham
Atlas Gallery
Picasso, 1932 (printed 1981)
Man Ray
L’SPACE Gallery
Years later, the actual painting became hers. Madonna acquired Self-Portrait with Monkey at auction in the late 1980s and loaned it to Tate Modern for its 2001 Kahlo survey. Around a decade later, she deepened her holdings with another of Kahlo’s most visceral works, My Birth (1932), acquired through a private sale.
It is easy to see what Madonna found in Kahlo: an artist who fashioned autobiography, physicality, sexuality, and pain into an uncompromising public image. Those same forces have run through Madonna’s own career, which has repeatedly tested the standards imposed on women’s bodies and turned sexuality into both spectacle and a means of self-authorship.
Kahlo is far from the only modernist in Madonna’s collection. Works by Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger, Man Ray, and Tamara de Lempicka have also been reported among her holdings.
From collector to collaborator
Madonna’s engagement with art has never stopped at ownership. Over the decades, she has maintained an unusually active network of friendships, collaborations, and partnerships with living artists.
The forms of that support vary considerably. In 1997, she sponsored MoMA’s exhibition “Cindy Sherman: The Complete Untitled Film Stills.” In 2001, she presented the Turner Prize to Martin Creed during a live broadcast. And in 2017, she joined Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak and artist Marilyn Minter for a public discussion about feminism and art.
Minter is also represented in Madonna’s collection, as is Tracey Emin. Madonna owns Emin’s 2001 mixed-media work It Just Happens, a characteristically unguarded declaration of desire and autonomy, qualities that readily rhyme with Madonna’s own creative persona.
Madonna : Time lapse photograph spiritual value, 1998
David LaChapelle
Eternity Gallery
Her relationships with artists continue to evolve. During a visit last year to Emin’s foundation in Margate, England, Madonna met with young artists in residence—and did not leave empty-handed. Works she encountered there, including sculptures by Brazilian artist Anderson Asteclines and a small painting by Ethiopian artist Kirubel Mandefro, now hang in her London townhouse.
The gesture says something about the kind of collector Madonna has become. Her interest is not restricted to trophies by canonical names. The same curiosity that once drew her toward artists in downtown New York still appears to guide her toward work being made now.
When art becomes material
For another pop star, name-checking an artist in a lyric or borrowing an artwork for a stage set might read as cultural signaling. With Madonna, the relationship is harder to separate from the work itself. She did not observe the downtown culture that produced Basquiat, Haring, Scharf, and Julian Schnabel from a distance. She emerged from inside it.
In that sense, Madonna was not simply a muse to artists. She adopted one of their fundamental strategies: treating the self as material. Her body, clothes, sexuality, religion, celebrity, and public image became things to be constructed, dismantled, quoted, and reconstructed again.
Art history consequently surfaces throughout her career almost as a second visual language. Horst P. Horst’s photographs famously informed the video for “Vogue,” while the imagery surrounding “Open Your Heart” drew heavily on the paintings of de Lempicka. Minter’s Green Pink Caviar (2009) became a video backdrop on Madonna’s Sticky & Sweet Tour, while animated versions of Haring’s radiant figures appeared elsewhere in the show.
Helen Bennett, Cape, 1936
Horst P. Horst
Robert Klein Gallery
Femme a la Mandoline, circa 1933
Tamara de Lempicka
Heritage Auctions
More recently, the references have migrated into the lyrics themselves. On 2012’s “I Fucked Up,” Madonna imagines an unrealized domestic future: “We coulda bought a house with a swimming pool / Filled it up with Warhols, it would be so cool.”
But perhaps no song makes the relationship between Madonna and the art world as explicit as her recent single “Danceteria.” Released this summer, the track looks back at the scene from which she emerged, name-checking Haring, Basquiat, Maripol, Fab Five Freddy, Scharf, and powerful downtown dealer Tony Shafrazi.
It plays almost like an oral history set to a dance beat. More than four decades after Madonna arrived in New York asking to be taken to “the center of it all,” “Danceteria” makes the case that she did not simply find that center. She was part of what made it one.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/msp2MdT
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