“Stephen Torton Changed the History of Art”: A Re-examination of the New Wave, as Told by Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Assistant
- Grace Miskovsky
- Aug 5, 2024
- 12 min read
Updated: Jan 23
As I sat at a hip tabac on Rue de Bretagne in Le Marais, brim filled with mustache-clad French boys chatting too fast in an unfamiliar tongue, one voice stood out. He spoke with the intensity immediately recognizable as that of a native New Yorker, spilling secrets of a long-lost time in the 1980’s when he worked as an assistant to a famous artist, jet setting to Zurich to set up the anonymous creative’s exhibitions, partying at Studio 54 and romping around the downtown New York City art scene, photographing the artist’s girlfriend (who he name-dropped as Madonna), sharing exchanges with Andy Warhol, and ultimately developing a contentious relationship with the mainstream media and major art institutions after the artist’s untimely death at 27. I couldn’t help but put all the pieces together after an hour of eavesdropping on the conversation between this man and his friend. I was sitting next to the former assistant of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
After interjecting and introducing myself, I met Stephen Torton, who served as Basquiat’s assistant from 1982-1983, known as “undisputedly the most confident and dynamic of his career and the most desirable to collectors” (Scott Nussbaum, Head of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, New York). Jeffrey Deitch was quoted as saying that “Everybody around him knew that these [1982 paintings] were extraordinary,” and Basquiat himself stated that “[In 1982] I made the best paintings ever." I came to learn that Stephen Torton had an undeniable impact on the conception, creation and craftsmanship embedded into these works, known today as masterpieces. But the underbelly of the successes of the Basquiat golden years tell a more fraught story, relayed to me by Stephen when we came together for an interview a few days later at his studio in Paris. It is a story of deceit, conspiracy, and a paradigm of an abuse of power within the upper echelon of the international art community comprised of names such as Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips, all at the expense of those, like Stephen, who dare to subvert the traditional Basquiat story we art-lovers so indulgently, and perhaps ignorantly, eat.
Stephen Torton is a born and bred New Yorker, having lived in three boroughs by the time he was five years old. By age eleven, during the emergence of bussing, he moved to a garden apartment housing complex, built by Robert Moses, in Queens. Stephen was then sent to a predominantly Black school in South Jamaica as part of the Great Society Programs bussing for racial integration. The World Fair, a culture of Zionism and racism, and middle class people being displaced set the cultural tone for his upbringing - and being white in a Black majority would later influence his interpersonal dynamics with Jean-Michel, who took on the cliche of a white assistant to a successful Black artist with joy and laughter. Stephen was always a photographer, selling photos of his young peers to their parents for $1. Looking back, he says the primary aesthetic value in these works is the kid-to-kid point of view of the portraits, and the entrepreneurial value in this early practice was his emerging interest in the business of art. The materially unambitious yet sharp-minded balance of aesthetics and business had a certain consistency in Torton’s career and served as an early parallel to Basquiat’s own financial and artistic equilibrium.
The story of how Stephen and Jean-Michel met begins in Berlin, Germany, where Stephen lived for a short time in his early 20’s. He went to see John Lurie play with the Lounge Lizards at the Philharmonie and waited outside the venue before the show started in hopes of introducing himself to the band. He did, then scored a backstage seat, and subsequently made close friends with the Lizards, driving them around the cobblestone streets of Kreuzberg and Neukölln in his decked out van with a Saudi Arabian license plate while conceptualizing a surveillance-themed Super 8 film starring his then-girlfriend called “Watch Being Watched,” which touched on Foucault and the Panopticon. Back in New York, where Stephen moved back to after his stint in Berlin, the film was shown at Squat Theater, The Kitchen, and at a 1983 video history exhibition at the New York City Museum of Modern Art alongside John Baldessari’s “I Am Making Art” and Richard Serra’s “TV Delivers People.” Stephen, recognizable as a player in the new wave, yet still sitting at its outskirts, was mostly working odd jobs as many artists did. The day Stephen and Jean-Michel’s paths were crossed, via John Lurie, Stephen’s job in question was the construction of a loft for Toni Smith’s daughter, Bebe, on Ludlow Street in the Lower East Side. One morning at the Smith’s loft, Lurie, who was already close friends with Jean-Michel, asked Stephen to accompany him on a visit to the artist.
In 1977, when Stephen was 19, he came to Paris. There was a burger joint called Mother Earth, filled with Frenchies, the punk scene, and sprinkled with emerging American literary talent. It was a small hub of against-the-grain individuals looking to party and eat burgers, getting rowdy just enough that a bouncer at the door was required. Stephen told me that the previous bouncer at Mother Earth “got shot in the balls” during a particularly wild night of bouncing, so he was hired for a brief moment to run the door. This was his first introduction to the realm of nightlife and a new, emerging culture of punk-y, displaced expats, artistic druggies, and international folks interested in a new way of seeing and doing. Having security experience in Paris on his resume was what led Jean-Michel Basquiat, on the day the two met, to initially hire Stephen Torton to bounce a party he was throwing. Accepting this first offer was the beginning of Stephen’s exploration through the downtown art scene and nightlife crowd of the 1980’s.
One facet of this new scene was a collaborative artist group and political outpost called COLAB, that was founded in 1977 and produced the first exhibition Basquiat was a part of in 1980, shortly before he was introduced to Torton. Stephen became involved in COLAB post-Basquiat-introduction, around the time they began video production. The group decided to pool money together to purchase video equipment to release footage - and because Stephen was the only one with a steady job and enough money to make a significant contribution, they insisted he put in $1,000, with which he bought a professional television camera and produced a documentary for Liza Bear’s cable TV series on the artist-run Channel C. It was around this time that Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was already reaching new heights as a successful painter, extended his second job offer to Stephen. And third, and fourth. Stephen Torton declined the request to be Jean-Michel’s assistant three times before he eventually fell into the work. One night at Jean-Michel’s, Stephen was asked if he knew how to make a stretcher bar and create a canvas for a painting the artist wanted to start. Out of wood and rope, Stephen assembled a stretcher. Jean-Michel then began painting, stroking the canvas with large brushes, breathing intensity and improvisation into this handmade assemblage. He then handed Torton a wad of cash and a list of improvements that needed to be made around his apartment - shutters to be fixed, locks to be added to the front door, and of course, more canvases to be stretched. In the same breath, Basquiat bounced out of the door to attend an exhibition of his work in Paris, leaving Stephen living in Jean-Michel’s apartment alone for a week with a list of tasks and some cash. When the artist returned to New York City, finding the tasks completed to perfection, the two of them fell head first into a symbiotic partnership - when Jean-Michel gave him a problem, Stephen found a solution.
Jean-Michel Basquiat loved cliches, said Stephen. There was a certain flirtatiousness in the flexuous nature of the relationship which developed, full of surprises and irony. The two jokingly looked on at the art world, who would gawk at the prospect of the white, buttoned up, Jewish “accountant” working tirelessly underneath the behemothic genius of a twenty-something, scruffy kid from the “inner city” on an artistic rampage to develop the new wave. The two played into their respective, slightly unconventional stereotypes, sharing a laugh between themselves at the ignorant eagerness of art giants to pigeon hole Jean-Michel. What was largely overlooked was Basquiat’s cultural intellect, entrepreneurial sophistication, and highly disciplined consciousness. Stephen described him as “the most brilliant and educated person I’ve ever met,” yet the critical focus in that context was Jean’s drugginess, his supposed poor relationship to women and sex, his participation in the cesspool of downtown 1980’s nightlife, and his alleged, but completely fallacious, romance with Stephen Torton himself. These embellished and often untrue narratives are just the beginning of a history of the misconstruction of truth and debasement of memory by major players in the art world who directly profit from this hyper-iconic image of Basquiat as a “genius drug addict” riddled with trauma and unhinged sexuality.
The love that these men developed for each other permeated Basquiat’s work during the 1982-83 years, which Stephen describes as a dialogue between the two of them. Words and turns of phrases that Stephen said, however offhandedly, were reused as textual elements in Basquiat’s work. Stephen was also used as a model for Basquiat’s figurative paintings, and he estimates that he impacted around ten works in that period by posing while building, serving food, or performing other tasks for the artist. Stephen would also paint with and for Basquiat. When Bruno Bischofberger flew out Jean-Michel and Stephen to his European debut in Zurich, the dealer asked Stephen, “Are you an artist, too?,” which Stephen denied. Basquiat jumped in, however, and said, “Yes, he is.” After the Zurich trip, as Jean-Michel and Andy Warhol began working with each other, Stephen was instructed to deliver one of his boss’s portraits to Andy. With fresh paint on hands and arms from carrying the portrait, Stephen naturally looked like its sole maker. Andy Warhol later asked Jean-Michel who the actual artist was, to which he replied, “My assistant painted it.” Through a constant stream of gallerists, publicists, and friends coming in and out of his apartment, Stephen recalls Greek billionaire Philip Niarchos sitting on Basquiat’s couch while Stephen began a canvas for the artist. “A little to the left,” said Jean-Michel, instructing Stephen’s brushstrokes, acting as a creative director, or a visionary, while his assistant completed the delegated task. Torton recalls that his job was like being a “soldier” in the way he reactively provided answers to consistently emerging and meticulous questions regarding design and construction. Yet, perhaps more important was what Stephen actually invented within Basquiat’s world.
Torton conceptualized key aspects of Basquiat’s greatest body of work during this period, such as the implementation of wood pallets, crates, boxes, and door frames in addition to unorthodox canvas stretchers. Works with these wooden elements, made between 1982-1983, were largely direct products of Stephen Torton’s genius, and display a consistent chronology of his contributions. He also invented a new way of displaying triptychs by screwing hinges into the edges of three paintings so they could open and close freely like a doorframe. Not only did he conceive and direct this painting methodology for Basquiat, he was the sole craftsman and maker of its constituents. Embedded within the value of these nontraditional methods of presentation is the idea that these works are mid-points between painting and sculpture, mirroring the 1950’s assemblage work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, with this lineage going even as far back as Marcel Duchamp in the early 1900’s. Anina Nosei, Basquiat’s first art dealer, was quoted as saying that “Stephen Torton changed the history of art.” She believed that Stephen’s works were revolutionary creations, and that it was through his inventions, his playfulness with materiality, and his craftsmanship, that Stephen offered Basquiat - and those who view his paintings - a transcendent way of presenting and seeing art. Nosei is one of the very few major players in the art world who today will publicly recognize Stephen’s role in art history, and the two remain in close contact, while on the other hand, tensions have developed between the assistant, looking for some semblance of recognition, and major institutions who sell the work he has made without accreditation. Many major catalogs and publications have redacted Stephen’s name in subsequent, revised editions of texts which once acknowledged him. Any attempt to gain recognition for paintings on wood and boxes that Stephen made have been iron-fistedly quashed. A painting titled “ERNOK,” gifted by Jean-Michel to Stephen, which was being held in the artist’s apartment at the time of his death, is still in the possession of the artist’s estate, without any sign of return to its original owner, Stephen. Major news syndicates are uninterested in pursuing an alternate narrative of Basquiat and afraid of the implications of adding Stephen’s name to history. In Sotheby’s collection of works on “Found Objects” by Basquiat, crates and pallets are misclassified as “found,” meaning, found on the street or in a pile of garbage. While there is often an intentionality to the works’ grunginess and may have the appearance of something found, many were made from new wood, and are diligently handcrafted and transformed by Stephen Torton, a fact which is manipulatively looked over by the auction house. Perhaps this anecdote, relayed to me by Stephen, best illustrates the nature of the relationship between the former assistant and the mainstream art world: At a 30th anniversary show put on by Gagosian, a portrait of Stephen titled “In Italian” (1983) by Jean-Michel Basquiat was presented. Torton pointed at the painting and said to Larry Gagosian, “Hey, that’s me!” to which the latter replied, “No one gives a fuck.”
Another factor in Torton’s erasure from the traditional Basquiat tale is his notable involvement in authentication. His unique position as not only the maker of many works but a close friend and collaborator grants him specific knowledge on the construction techniques embedded within Basquiat’s paintings, principally those which involve wood or sculptural elements. His opinions on valuation and authentication should be highly respected due to his positioning, which makes him, in the eyes of the upper echelon, extremely helpful if contained, and extraordinarily dangerous if set loose. Perhaps the best example of this is a recent scandal regarding a forged Basquiat work made available by Wienerroither & Kohlbacher and its curator, Dieter Buchhart, and Andre Heller, the original owner of the work, at the European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF) art fair in 2017. Heller, who was involved in Basquiat dealings in the artists’ short lifetime, presented a framed work, claimed to be made in 1987, and listed the frame for $3 million, and the portrait inside, an authentic Basquiat which was purchased by Heller from the Robert Miller Gallery, for $2 million. The importance of the frame especially was its non-traditional and sculptural materiality - hundreds of nails stuck out of blackened and polished broomsticks, which, at their intersections, were bound with twine. The frame was collaged with randomized red brushstrokes and torn, original Basquiat drawings. Andre Heller, in an interview with Buchart, said of the work and its alleged conception, “An assistant organized the materials and then [Basquiat] assembled it, wrapped in twine. We were at his studio and assembled it on the floor; I helped to hammer in the nails because there were so many involved… It was absolutely clear to me that [the nails were] from voo- doo. We spoke about this, that many African sculptures have nails. I said, “Ah, it’s a kind of voodoo frame,” and he said, “kind of.” There’s a lot of Haiti in there.”
While its supposed value was its rarity and departure from previous works, Stephen Torton, when visiting the fair, immediately recognized the frame as forged and Andre Heller’s story as fabricated. He is used to looking at Basquiats that aren’t certified, and checks the screws drilled into the stretcher bars and frames to see what factory they are made from. Torton could identify that Andre Heller’s frame was made by a precise and talented Viennese craftsperson or carpenter with select tools - not his then-deceased friend Jean-Michel, whose supposed alignment with “voodoo” only existed in the imagination of the dealer. He alerted the dealers of W&K, and told them that although he could not outright say the frame was fake, he could show them the specific elements that would lead him to believe it was fraudulent. The dealers insisted on the work’s authenticity. Basquiat’s family, custodians of his estate, possibly told Buchart and Heller to disregard the claims of fraud in hopes of the frame’s acquisition. The goal then, of both the Heller-Buchart duo and the Basquiat family itself, was to discredit Stephen as a satisfactory and trustworthy perspective. The story of the TEFAF scandal ends, however, in not only the defamation of Stephen Torton, but the defeat of Andre Heller in his hopes of selling a fake painting. Heller, exposed by the press, ultimately bought back the frame for 800,000 euro, but no legal action ensued due to a nuance in Austrian law which pardoned him because the action of buying back the frame supposedly showed his remorse. Both parties had lost, but Andre Heller got off with a simple pardon for his crime, meanwhile Stephen continues to be a victim of erasure.
Since Basquiat’s death in 1988, he has become arguably the most notable artists of contemporary art history, smashing auction house records with his works selling in the hundreds of millions, and being posthumously honored with critical acclaim in large scale exhibitions in international spaces. His signature textual motifs can be found printed onto cheap t-shirts and backpacks, his crown icons are tattooed into millennial’s skin, and the Noho apartment on Great Jones Street where he lived and died is a popular loitering spot for a coterie of hip, wannabe graffiti artists who worship his front stoop. But this facade of who Basquiat was and what his primary conceptual interests were have been manipulatively construed to garner an essence of relatability among viewers, and by extension, profit from them. Throughout this process, alternative narratives that question institutional or mainstream credibility are not only brushed to the wayside, but shrewdly annihilated. Stories like Stephen’s are threats to an existing paradigm of power which remembers Basquiat in a specific and limiting way, but deserve to be heard in order to deepen our understanding of art history and culture. While Stephen and I talked for hours, I couldn’t help but draw parallels between the ways in which society has indulged itself in Basquiat’s story without the thought or care to seek out opposing narratives and how we similarly rely on dominant perspectives to show shortsited visions of truth. Without stretching ourselves to seek out the fullness of the stories which construct our worldview, we are doing ourselves, art history, and the rest of society a disservice.
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