I still own a painting that I purchased at a flea market in Los Angeles in 1993. I got it cheap; $25 and it was in the back of my clapped-out convertible . It turned out to be a copy of Bronzino’s Portrait of a Young Man with a Book. In 16th-century Florence, if you wanted your portrait painted then he was your man, for one simple reason: he made you look great. His particular gift – and shrewd commercial decision – was to imbue his wealthy subjects with swagger, confidence and even a certain weight loss.
Three centuries before you could sit before a photographer and more than four before you could take a selfie, rich Florentines would sit still for days and trust that Bronzino would do for them what he’d done for their wealthy neighbours, for Dante. It paid to flatter.
In recent years, I’ve had, as a screenwriter, to wrestle with the extent to which the artist should or should not seek to serve the vanity of the subject and have now done so across an array of “sitters”, from popes Francis and Benedict to Stephen Hawking… and now Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
I take it as self-evident that I am serving art, not biography; that the facts alone, as far as they can ever be known, will simply not do. Where’s the room for interpretation, for “my” depiction?
These issues were very much on my mind when I began to write my play about Warhol and Basquiat, two men with carefully managed personas. How could I capture them whole – not as they wished to be seen but in a way that tells us something we don’t already know, precisely because they didn’t want us to know.
In the case of Warhol you might almost say that he was all persona. His greatest creation was his own image. His journey, from pale runt out of steel-town America to wig-wearing aesthete presiding over American art, was one entirely of painful self-creation. He thought art should do no more than give you a nice little hit, “like when you see a celebrity in the street”. It should purely be about surfaces because, as such, it reflected that modern life had become all surface, no substance.
Basquiat also barely said boo in public. He was the first high-profile black painter America had ever seen and was young when he became famous, so young it almost hurt. In fact, his fame did hurt.. The attention that came so quickly overwhelmed him as the money rolled in and he tried to maintain his air of hobo chic, of smack-addicted street artist turned gallery genius in paint-spattered Armani suits.
Although he did sleep rough on the busted streets of New York’s Lower East Side when he first crossed the river from Brooklyn, his father was actually a successful accountant and he had lived in a brownstone house for his entire childhood and been educated in an expensive private school. Here, again, persona meets reality and produces a tantalising shortfall.
So, how do you get under the hood of such types who, we can assume, would rather sit for a Bronzino than a Lucian Freud?
In the case of Warhol, a quick read of his diaries helped convince me that I could create, on stage, a mouthy Andy, a rivalrous Andy, a take-no-prisoners talker. For here, in his entries, was a character totally different from any I’d seen drawn: a gossip, a torrential name-dropper and popper of bubble reputations who was every bit as bitchy as his one-time crush, Truman Capote.
Basquiat was a tougher nut to crack in that there is very little extant of his utterances and beliefs. And yet we have the thousand paintings he left before his death from an accidental heroin overdose, aged 27. From these, I figured, a depiction could be made.
The paintings, I feel, tell us a great deal about the burden that he shouldered. His works teem with a playful but troubled questioning, inviting us to conclude that, unlike Warhol, he believed in the power of art to transform the artist and the viewer.
So, if someone in my position is to offer anything worthwhile beyond biography, strict rules must be observed. The portrait must be drawn from deep research (sorry, Bronzino) but it can’t give up its interpretive responsibilities. Whether we’re talking about unreliable entries left behind in a diary or just obscure markings on a canvas, real lives can still be discerned in the mists.
• Anthony McCarten is a novelist, screenwriter and playwright. His films include The Theory of Everything and The Two Popes. The Collaboration is at the Young Vic
