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Home is where the art is
Home to a new art venue and one of art's legends, The Bowery Hotel in New York is where we stay when in town, and with a new contemporary art space (The New Museum) closeby it led us to contemplate art scenes past and present.
A short hop skip and jump from our beloved Bowery bar brings us to Great Jones Street. At the corner of 3rd and Bowery, Fifty Seven Great Jones Street was home to artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, a loft space rented from his contemporary Andy Warhol. Basquiat lived and ended his life there, in an apartment unlike today that artists were able to afford (pre-fame obviously). With Manhattan sadly emptied of artists now cosy in Brooklyn or Berlin, it is some salvation to know that at number fifty-seven, (now nestled amongst the omnipresent trendy bars and sushi places) there lived a dying species – a real and working artist who personified the eighties (sadly also the beginnings of rent hikes that would see artists banished from the island).
Andy meanwhile was nestled in an Upper East Side town house – (until 1974) located at 1342 Lexington Avenue near 89th Street. He bought the home in 1959 for both him and his mother and was the space where he created some of his earliest and most influential Pop Art (the soup cans, the dollar bills…) and considered to be one of the first Warhol factories.
The house was sold earlier this year to a private owner – the asking price was in the region of five million dollars. Ironically, on par with the price of Warhol’s dollar bill paintings…
TAGS: great jones street andy warhol jean-michel basquiat the bowery hotel lexington avenue pop art the factory bowery
