Art doesn't exist in silence. For Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, music was fuel for their creativity, a lens through which they saw and reinterpreted the world around them. From the syncopated rhythms of bebop to the raw energy of hip-hop and punk, music shaped their visual languages in ways both subtle and explosive. What emerged was a body of work that doesn’t just reference sound, it moves to its rhythm.
Though Roy Lichtenstein is often seen as the most formally restrained of the Pop artists, his early engagement with jazz set the tempo for his later compositions. Born in 1923, Lichtenstein was a saxophonist in his youth and a lifelong fan of jazz. He once described how “jazz and comic books” were his earliest creative influences. His signature Ben-Day dot paintings, with their bold colours and onomatopoeic language - Whaam!, Varoom! - echo the stop-start rhythm of improvisational music. In pieces like The Melody Haunts My Reverie (1965), a direct reference to the jazz standard “Stardust,” Lichtenstein plays with both visual and musical nostalgia, using repetition and cadence to build visual syncopation.
Andy Warhol, on the other hand, was deeply embedded in the music scene, not just as an observer but as a key player. His close association with The Velvet Underground is legendary; he produced their debut album The Velvet Underground & Nico and designed its now-iconic banana cover. Warhol understood that music and image were becoming indivisible in a media-saturated culture. His portraits of Mick Jagger, Debbie Harry, and Prince weren’t just celebrity snapshots, they were meditations on performance, persona, and sound. The Factory, Warhol’s New York studio, often pulsed with live music, acting as a kind of experimental stage for visual and sonic collaboration. In his words, "Pop art is about liking things," and Warhol liked sound - particularly the sounds that reflected fame, glamour, and artifice.
If Warhol was the producer of cool detachment, Jean-Michel Basquiat was pure improvisational heat. Music wasn’t an influence for Basquiat, it was a language. He was fascinated by jazz, particularly bebop, and idolised musicians like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. The raw, layered energy of Basquiat’s paintings mimics the structure of a jazz solo; fragments of text, crossed-out lines, symbols, sudden bursts of colour and rhythm. Works like Horn Players (1983) explicitly reference Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, not just in subject but in form. As curator Dieter Buchhart explains, Basquiat “transferred the energy of jazz into visual art… he was sampling before sampling became a musical phenomenon”. Basquiat’s connection to music extended beyond jazz. Coming of age in New York’s downtown scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s, he was also part of the early hip-hop movement. He played in a band called Gray and collaborated with figures like Fab 5 Freddy and Rammellzee. His paintings are visual mixtapes, blending Black musical history with street culture and social critique. In many ways, Basquiat was both the poet and the DJ.
Keith Haring, too, emerged from this electric convergence of music and street culture. Arriving in New York in the late ’70s, Haring became a regular at clubs like Paradise Garage, where house, disco, and early hip-hop were not just soundtracks, but communities. Haring often painted live to music, at parties, in clubs, even on dance floors. The visual rhythm of his work - the radiating babies, barking dogs, and writhing bodies - mirrors the beat-driven repetition of the dance tracks that filled his world. As art critic Robert Farris Thompson noted, Haring’s work "carried the cadence of the dance floor, the public mural, the protest chant". Haring also collaborated directly with musicians, designing album covers for Run DMC and producing stage visuals for Grace Jones. For him, music and art were forms of activism, tools to energise, unify, and provoke. In the 1980s, Haring was among the most visible artists fighting the AIDS crisis, and many of his public projects were created to the pulse of protest and the soundtrack of resistance.
What links all four artists is not simply a love of music, but an instinctive understanding that music and visual art were converging in new and radical ways. They didn’t just illustrate music; they absorbed its structures, borrowed its languages, and reflected its power back through paint and print. Whether it was Lichtenstein’s jazz-like phrasing, Warhol’s pop-star alchemy, Basquiat’s freestyle sampling, or Haring’s kinetic groove, each of them helped to shape a new kind of art; one that danced, shouted, whispered and pulsed.
At Andipa Editions, we are constantly drawn to this rich interplay of disciplines. In the prints of these artists, you can almost hear the sound that shaped them: the crackle of vinyl, the echo of a saxophone, the thump of a bassline under city lights. Their work invites us not just to look, but to listen.
