On Wednesday afternoon, Larry Gagosian arrived in Los Angeles from New York and went to the Beverly Hills outpost of his global gallery empire, a ride that took slightly longer given the unrelenting rain.

“Beautiful day in Los Angeles, huh?” he said, smiling, as he entered.

It was 24 hours before the unveiling of a show of classic works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Gagosian entered the gallery wearing a baseball cap from the Blue Parrot, the East Hampton Tex-Mex joint he has invested in. He had last checked in with the LA team a week ago, when only two paintings had been installed, but he knew the work quite well. Gagosian personally organized the show with the curator Fred Hoffman, but he had an even deeper connection to the works. The show, “Made on Market Street,” consists entirely of art Basquiat made while in Los Angeles between 1982 and 1984. For part of that time, the late artist set up his studio at 51 Market Street in Venice Beach, inside the home of Larry Gagosian.

As the dealer walked through his galleries, some four decades after he watched the paintings’ creation, he stopped in front of Hollywood Africans, which he had sold to the late collector Douglas Cramer in 1983. Cramer then donated it to the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1984, after MoMA and MOCA in LA had turned him down—“not quite sure they were ready for Basquiat,” Cramer said later. Now, Whitney director Scott Rothkopf has told Gagosian that Hollywood Africans is the most sought-after loan-requested work in the museum’s vast collection.

From there Gagosian went through the vitrines, which contain press clippings and show cards and such gems as Basquiat’s hotel folio from the five-star L’Ermitage Beverly Hills: $215 a night for the room, $151 for a limousine, $500 for something dubbed “miscellaneous services.” A gallery director pointed out the plane ticket Gagosian had bought for Madonna to return home after seeing her boyfriend Basquiat in LA. It was a $530 Trans World flight leaving LAX on December 28, 1982, at 8:30 a.m., first class. There was one receipt from a trip to the art-supply store for 13 tubes of acrylic silver costing $37.24, and another from Nurmsen Paint, on December 9, 1982, for over $300 in art supplies.

There were receipts from the day’s trendy Beverly Hills restaurants. At one point, Gagosian noted that Basquiat’s favorite restaurant to go to in LA was Mr. Chow. The artist was friends with the proprietor Michael Chow and his glamorous wife, Tina, as Basquiat was also a regular at the New York outpost. As I was leaving, Gagosian asked me if I was coming to his dinner there Thursday—he always has his dinner for the pre-Oscars show at the same place, but this time there would be a personal touch. He’ll celebrate a Basquiat show at Basquiat’s favorite restaurant in Los Angeles.

This era—when Jean-Michel Basquiat set up a studio at Larry Gagosian’s modernist beach house in Venice Beach and made over 100 paintings at the peak of his powers—has become pretty mythologized over the years. Which is understandable. The most iconic artist of the ’80s was shacking up with the world’s biggest art dealer, cranking out masterpieces while on all-night binges, rolling up to Spago with friends from New York like the artist Toxic and the hip-hop pioneer Rammellzee.

Basquiat’s LA sojourn also got a different kind of attention in 2022, when the Orlando Museum of Art opened a show of works that the museum claimed had gone missing for decades after the artist made them in Venice. Then the show was raided by the FBI, which investigated the works as fakes, and a California man admitted to the feds that he made all the forgeries himself to turn a quick buck. The museum is currently suing former director Aaron De Groft, who pushed the show forward. I wrote a story about the entire debacle, and even after the forger confessed, De Groft told me it was a “totally sweet-deal cover-up,” and countersued the museum.

“Made on Market Street” is essentially a museum show staged in a gallery, aiming for the level of the impressive Basquiat spectacles that have been staged at private institutions in recent years. In 2023 the artist’s family organized a tour of their holdings in New York and Los Angeles called “King Pleasure” that prompted lines around the block. The sprawling survey staged at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2019 took over the Frank Gehry–designed art fortress in the oak forests outside Paris, and featured a staggering number of impossible-to-secure loans. The curator Dieter Buchhart told me at the time that, given the logistical nightmare of getting all those Basquiats in one place, a show like that would never be staged again.

There’s never been an exhibition devoted solely to works Basquiat actually made while in LA, partially because it’s nearly impossible for a private gallery to stage any kind of major Basquiat show. Gagosian Gallery hasn’t put one together since exhibitions in New York and Hong Kong in 2013, and in the last decade the prices for big Basquiat paintings have gone through the roof. In 2017, Yusaku Maezawa bought a large skull painting for $110.5 million, and in 2020 Ken Griffin bought Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump from Peter Brant for more than $100 million. This makes shipping big works and insuring them prohibitively expensive. Finding lenders willing to consign a work for sale is nearly impossible, and “Made on Market Street” is functioning essentially as a loan-heavy show free to the public in Beverly Hills—though sources indicated that one or two works given by private collectors could be for sale if the right buyer comes forward.