Scott Spiegel, Los Angeles Fred Hoffman Gallery, New York Christie's New York, May 17, 2000, International Contemporary Art, lot 150 Private collection, France (acquired from the above sale) ⁠Acquired from the above by the present owner

Anatomical fragments, cartoon heads, cryptic words, and symbols unfurl across Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982-83 Untitled drawing, each mark carrying the velocity of his hand and the force of his restless imagination. Created during the defining years of his career, Untitled crystallizes Basquiat’s vocabulary into a visual lexicon that immortalizes the collision of science and pop culture, street and studio, observation and invention within his oeuvre. A compulsive draftsman Basquiat covered any surface within reach with his rapid, charged scrawl. In the studio, fueled by the steady pulse of jazz and the chatter of cartoons, he culled images directly from the world around him, layering art-historical references with the grit of 1980s New York. The result was not a static synthesis but a constant stream — a restless flow of symbols and images rushing through his mind and onto the page. As intellectually curious as he was street smart, books were of great importance to Basquiat. While hospitalized as a child, he devoured a copy of Gray’s Anatomy gifted to him by his mom. Its clinical diagrams of bones and organs became a lifelong touchstone, resurfacing throughout his skeletal figures and exposed bodies. Cartoons offered another register. With their slapstick gestures, superhero bravado, and bold graphics, the comic-book characters of his youth persisted on his drawings and canvases. To this he added the cryptic symbols catalogued in Henry Dreyfuss’s Symbol Sourcebook — alchemy signs, electrical codes, arcane glyphs. Together these sources armed him with a visual arsenal, bridging science and pop culture, childhood wonder and the rigor of symbolic systems. Language became one of Basquiat’s fiercest tools, famously claiming that he used words like brushstrokes. On canvas, he commanded written word into multiple functions — a fusion of image, rhythm, concept, and diary forced to move closer to lyrical jazz riffs than prose. Basquiat’s ability to blur meaning and intent coursed throughout his art. “Basquiat kept no standard records,” Phoebe Hoban has explained. “But there are records, hundreds of them. Drawings, paintings, and notebooks that reveal him like a Rorschach test.” Grocery lists, phone numbers, debts, menus, scraps of history all found their way into the work. He didn’t just draw on paper or paint on canvas; he lived in it, scribbling across its surface until the line between life and art all but dissolved. The chaos of the artist’s studio reflected the visceral energy with which Basquiat worked. Paintings and drawings sprawled across the floor in shifting stages of completion, smeared with footprints, spills, and revisions. “Scarred, torn, and trampled,” Robert Storr observed, “much of his work on paper bears the direct imprint of his urgency. Drawing, for him, was something you did rather than something done.” Out of this momentum, recurring themes emerged: words and symbols that circled questions of power, commerce, authenticity, and value. Even the copyright sign, carried over from his graffiti moniker SAMO©, became a recurring emblem — part claim of authorship, part critique of ownership itself. Basquiat’s burgeoning stardom had reached fever pitch in 1982. In a single year, he exhibited with Annina Nosei in New York, Gagosian in Los Angeles, and Bruno Bischofberger in Zürich. That summer he became the youngest artist ever included in documenta, where his canvases hung alongside those of Richter, Twombly, and Warhol. He had also moved from the basement of Nosei’s Spring Street gallery into a cavernous Crosby Street loft—his first true studio — where he later recalled making his “best paintings ever.” It was in this moment that the crown emerged as his signature. According to his former girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk the crown saw its origins in the King World Productions logo at the end of The Little Rascals, a cartoon Basquiat watched religiously. But its resonance ran far deeper. In 1920s jazz circles, royalty was conferred on musicians who could draw the biggest crowds; the same logic flowed into late-1970s graffiti, where artists would crown one another kings of the subway lines. “If you were a king, you would crown yourself,” Fab 5 Freddy remembered. For Basquiat, the crown became both triumph and warning. He knew that glory came with peril — “most young kings get their heads cut off,” he scrawled across one canvas. Yet in 1982, flush with youth and fame, he wore it as a declaration: he was ruling the moment he had seized.