Mr Andy Warhol was an artist ahead of his time on various fronts, including, the very modern urge to document every moment. Way before Instagram Stories and Snapchat, he photographed the minutiae of his life, expending nearly a roll of film a day for most of his lifetime. Mr Warhol, perhaps mindful of his friends’ tolerance for viewing all this, shared very little but saved almost all of his pictures. Something which separates him from the likes-hungry social media users of today.

In 2014, the Andy Warhol Foundation set about airing more than 3,600 contact sheets featuring 130,000 negatives from the artist’s collection with a donation to the archive at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center. A new book, Warhol On Basquiat, combines 400 of these images with extracts from the posthumous The Andy Warhol Diaries, charting his friendship with Mr Jean-Michel Basquiat, the other defining Manhattanite of the era.

Messrs Basquiat and Warhol met in the early 1980s when the former was selling T-shirts for $10 and the latter’s celebrity was well established. At the time, art scene gossips portrayed their friendship as calculated but this new book, by Mr Michael Dayton Hermann of the Andy Warhol Foundation, takes a less cynical tack. Mr Basquiat and Mr Warhol did lots of other things besides being seen at all the right parties together. They went to the gym, for example, and collaborated on a number of artworks.

Things were not always plain sailing, though, and art critics were less than friendly about their joint efforts on canvas. The stories in Warhol On Basquiat suggest a bumpy friendship built on fractiousness, fragile egos and learning when to mind your business (and then write it all down in your journal, as Mr Warhol did). In other words, very much the kind of things that keep our own modern inner circles working. Here are five ways the artists navigated their friendship.

Mr Basquiat enjoyed a meteoric rise on the New York art scene. His art fetched $15,000 by late 1983, and Mr Warhol was an early champion. He rented an apartment to the younger artist and eased Mr Basquiat’s anxiety over the speed of his ascendancy. Privately, though, Mr Warhol shared some misgivings. “I got scared because he’s renting our building on Great Jones and what if he is a flash in the pan and doesn’t have the money to pay the rent?” Mr Warhol writes. Mr Basquiat paid his bills eventually and his work endured long after his untimely death in 1988 from a heroin overdose. A piece of his sold for $110.5m in 2017, beating a record set by Mr Andy Warhol.

The New York duo collaborated, but occasionally they left the handiwork to others. With Mr Basquiat’s star on the rise in summer of 1983, he and Mr Warhol would get manicures at a salon downtown. Later, these meetings dwindled as Mr Basquiat’s hectic love life took priority, which led to what those in the friendship business refer to as Major Drama.

Mr Warhol cultivated a detached air, but Mr Basquiat’s flakiness eventually got a reaction from the famously aloof artist. After being ditched in Europe, Mr Warhol lets loose in his diary. “Jean-Michel came by and I slapped him in the face,” Mr Warhol recounts. “I’m not kidding. Kind of hard. It shook him up a little. I said: ‘How dare you dump us in Milan!’”

The exact nature of Messrs Basquiat and Warhol’s relationship has been much speculated upon. Their frequent workouts, with the strikingly handsome Mr Basquiat bare-chested and in short shorts, did little to quell intrigue. Mr Warhol puts a dampener on any suggestion of sexual chemistry, however, when he confesses a major issue with the friend he’d photographed in a jockstrap: Mr Basquiat had body-odour issues. “All this BO has made me think about my life and how I’m not really missing anything great,” Mr Warhol confides in his diaries, after a particularly sweaty weights session.

On one occasion, Mr Basquiat and Mr Warhol attend a party held by Mr Jermaine Jackson. They end up in the wrong section and were told, in no uncertain times, to “beat it”. For Mr Basquiat, it becomes a teachable moment, telling Mr Warhol: “Now you know what it is to be black.” Mr Basquiat, however, did not always take the higher ground. The two artists fell out before Mr Warhol’s death in 1987. In an earlier huff, Mr Basquiat called his erstwhile friend from Hawaii, telling him he’d met some people who described Mr Warhol as “that death-warmed-over-person-on-drugs”. Mr Warhol – they are his diaries, after all – gets the last word, noting: “It’s him they should be talking about.”