In the late 1970s, in downtown Manhattan, the musician Chris Stein became friendly with a young artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Both men were a long way from the celebrated cultural figures they would become: Stein had just started to make some money as the guitarist of New York new-wave act Blondie, the band he co-founded with singer Debbie Harry in 1974; the teenage Basquiat, unable to pay for canvases, painted graffiti on to walls, floors or any material he could lay his hands on.
“I knew Jean pretty well and I said, ‘Do a painting’,” Stein recalls now on a video call from his apartment in New York. “I’m fairly certain it was the first thing he ever did on a canvas, because he had been painting on cardboard. He knew I was interested in militaria, so it was army men fighting with little cannons and shooting. It was pretty monochromatic and it was on a big piece of burlap, a rough canvas, not stretched on a frame, just by itself. And he gave it to me for 200 bucks. Then I later heard that he had been telling people how much he’d ripped me off for 200 bucks.”
