The Dos Cabezas (Spanish for Two Heads) is an acrylic and oil stick piece created on canvas and mounted on wood supports, which features Basquiat and Andy Warhol. In the initial years of the 1980s, when Basquiat met with his long-time idol, a pop artist from America, Andy Warhol, Basquiat was an upcoming artist. On October 4, 1982, after a meeting over lunch between the two spectacular artists organised by the art collector, Bruno Bischofberger, it was hastily drawn. Basquiat was so fascinated that he raced home after their encounter, created the painting, and sent it as a present to Warhol. Basquiat got the wet canvas shipped to Warhol within two hours after they'd met. This portrait of the two of them was the start of a legendary relationship.
Basquiat first came across Warhol when, in 1979, Andy bought a postcard from him. He revered Andy, although Warhol, reflecting on his journal post from The Andy Warhol Diaries, had a patronising initial interpretation of Jean-Michel. In his journal entry, Warhol depicts Basquiat as a kid who used to drive him crazy and to whom he would occasionally give handouts. He also makes mention of the Dos Cabezas painting that he was gifted, implying that the gift made an impact. This portrait sparked a near bond between them that culminated in collaboration on many paintings. While Basquiat and Warhol made many portraits of each other during the subsequent years, Dos Cabezas may be their only shared portrait.
Art institutions around the world have been host to this amazing portrait. Between 1992 and 1994, it moved from New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art to The Menil Collection in Houston to Iowa at the Des Moines Art Centre, and finally in Alabama, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. Later on, between March and June of 2005, it was exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, then transferred to Los Angeles and Houston in July and November of the same year, exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Fine Arts respectively. This magnificent artwork was sold on November 10, 2010, for a whopping $7,082,500 at a live auction during a Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale.