Larry Warsh on his approach to collecting

The three heads are scrawled in the middle of the page of a standard-sized ruled notebook, and barely take up a couple of lines. They are crude, and their faces expressionless. There is a crown floating weirdly over the third head. A couple of captions, written with precision in elegant capital letters, neater than the illustrations, are placed above and below the drawings. "Famous Negro Atheletes" (sic), reads the first; "Composite Drawings", says the one below.

Art historians of late-20th-century American art will instantly get the references: the sketch is a preliminary study for one of Jean-Michel Basquiat's most renowned series of works. It can be currently seen in an exhibition of the artist's hitherto undisplayed notebooks, at the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Here are the creative sparks behind some of Basquiat's most brooding, unsettling works, alongside random telephone numbers and shopping lists.

The eight notebooks that are the focus of the show have - literally - barely seen the light of day: they have been in boxes, inside a shopping bag, in the closet of their owner, the extrovert New York publisher Larry Warsh.

He bought them having been captivated by the artist, whose dash and daring, and sad demise, blazed such a trail over the New York art scene of the early 1980s.

Warsh says he acquired them in 1987 out of a desire to gain a greater understanding of the artist's impulses. He recalls the era of Basquiat and his contemporaries with fondness: "At that time, unlike today, there were these great artists, also Keith Haring, Francesco Clemente, and their art was affordable. And so you had the opportunity to focus on the work in depth," he tells me in a Skype conversation from New York.

"As soon as I started to become interested in contemporary art, I became an in-depth collector. It was much more gratifying, and it was not difficult to find the right pieces at the right prices. Today there are many more collectors who like to buy one work each from many artists, making their own 'cake', so that it reflects on themselves. I have nothing against that, but I found myself, once I was committed to an artist, wanting to collect anything that they did - paintings, posters, finished and unfinished."

He says there was an organic feel to the New York art scene in the early 1980s: "You could see these works just blocks from where they were created, and I just went with the flow. Then there were these great galleries and art-world figures: Rene Ricard, Jeffrey Deitch."

Ricard, the poet, painter and critic who published an important early essay on Basquiat, and who died last year, was a key figure of the time, says Warsh. "He was a brilliant man, who was very lucid whatever frame of mind he was in. He visited me all the time. He would barge in with all kinds of things - once, he brought 14 drawings by Basquiat (they were not finished) and said, 'You have to buy these now! This is his vocabulary, this is him!' I ended up buying them, but only later did I understand his words."

Warsh says he kept the artist's notebooks hidden away, only occasionally showing them to friends and scholars, waiting for "the right time" to bring them to public attention.

"When I bought them, many people asked why I would want a bunch of notebooks, but to me it was so obvious that they were works of art in themselves," he says. "It is easy to see these are not ordinary notebooks, because this was no ordinary artist. What they give you is this sense of what the artist was thinking in a particular moment. And they show how everything Basquiat did was actually very well thought out."

It is impossible, Warsh adds, to read Basquiat's pithy couplets and aphorisms without thinking of today: "They are so like Twitter threads or text messages." Some could happily be called poetry, he says. "For example, the couple of lines that read: 'Love is a Lie/Lover=Liar'. I am not a professor of literature, but that one really resonates with me, it is so simple but also deep and moving."

Warsh was an early collector of Ai Weiwei and continues to enjoy a close relationship with the artist. But he says the hyper-commodification of the art world makes his in-depth approach more difficult to practise.

"Once upon a time, the art world was a small group of people. Now it is so much bigger, and there are so many people buying works based on recommendations, without really understanding what they are buying.

"To me that is not a healthy development. When I was buying, I knew you couldn't really decide on, and understand, the importance of a work of art at the moment it was created. You needed time. But today that time just doesn't exist."

'Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks', Brooklyn Museum, New York, until August 23. brooklynmuseum.org

Photographs: Artestar/Gavin Ashworth/Brooklyn Museum; Mark Woods; Anna Gordon; Cindy Ord/Getty Images

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