Synthesizing autobiography, social outcry, and the artist’s idiosyncratic understanding of gestural draughtsmanship, Untitled, 1982 captures the expressive power and symbolic richness that are emblematic of its creator. Often feeling more adept working with oil stick on paper, here, Basquiat summons the same great gestural vigor as he did years earlier on the streets of New York as the graffiti-poet SAMO. And yet, Untitled is riddled with a vast array of images, motifs, and text that distinctively recall many of the artist’s most celebrated works from the early 1980s—a rich and varied lexicon that is unmistakably associated with the artist’s meteoric rise to fame. Not dissimilar to the anguish released on his commanding works on paper, Basquiat’s rapid ascension within the art world quickly made him the first Black artist to achieve celebrity status. However, without a doubt, Basquiat’s reign over the art world was one of unease. Never acknowledged for his sophisticated understanding of the history of art, Basquiat was often mocked by his peers as the van Gogh of the streets and pushed aside as a novelty act. Conscious of his new found identity within the predominantly white art world, Basquiat created a cast of characters, words, and symbols loosely articulated through graffiti inspired paintings and drawings that became vehicles for melding autobiography, popular culture, and Black history—pillars he would famously refer to as “royalty, heroism, and the streets.” Indeed, each of these pillars comes to life in the present work. Congruent to the execution of Untitled, 1982 ushered in the artist’s first solo exhibition at Annina Nosei in New York, which would spark further solo exhibitions in Los Angeles and Zurich. As Basquiat assumed his place as the anointed king of the art world, the crown became is trademark symbol. Harking back to his earlier years in the streets, the crown had become a staple of graffiti culture in the late 1970s. “If you were a king, you would crown yourself,” recalled Basquiat’s friend Fred Braithwaite (‘Fab 5 Freddy’). “It was common as part of the street graffiti vocabulary to put a crown over your name—specifically if your tag was on a particular train the most. You were essentially designated king of that line” (Fab 5 Freddy, quoted in J. Moore Saggese, Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art, Berkeley 2014, p. 55). Placing several of his crowns over crucifixes Basquiat declares himself both King and Messiah. And yet, in an almost prophetic manner, aware of his uneasy relationship with his own rising celebrity, by placing his crown directly over the crucifix—a symbol of life and death in both Basquiat’s Catholic and Vodou upbringing—Basquiat conjures the prescient phrase “most young kings get their heads cut off,” which he had daubed across his painting Charles the First. A haunting forerunner to his own tragic demise. Untitled too features some of Basquiat’s most cited phrases scrawled across the composition in an almost lyrical format, creating spell like incantations that function as images within the picture plane. The scratched-and-scrawled vocabulary that is interspersed among the mèlange of patterning, scribbles and blocks of color consciously extends the work of both Jean Dubuffet and Cy Twombly—though distilled and captured through his experience of graffiti. Summoning elements of the urban landscape, phrases such as “tar roof,” “asbestos,” and “lead” are repeated with the exhilarating rhythm of 1980s Lower Manhattan. While more reverence is given to the stacked passages “origin of cotton” “famous negro,” and “respo mundial” (worldwide response) as a way to confront the fraught history of African-Americans—a sentiment of exploitation which is further developed through the use of the tribal tent. Indeed, Basquiat worked tirelessly to expose the dynamic achievements and traumatic histories of People of Color to a wider audience. Set against the somber black background with chalk-like scribbles, Basquiat turns to his pantheon of heroic Black figures. Here, his protagonist is adorned with the artist’s iconic halo as a means to impart his hero with superiority and a divine aura. These roughly hewn male faces and torsos became a central motif in the artist’s oeuvre. With faces resembling masks or skulls set adrift within a pulsating, field of linear scribbles, his heroes became symbolic of the Black man making his way through the loud, gritty urban world. Reacting against the marginalization of Black males in society, the Basquiat often invested such totemic visages with "royalty" alluding to various Black heroes from different walks of life. Indeed, his personal pantheon of twentieth-century greats included athletes such as Hank Aaron, Mohammed Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson and musicians such as Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Dizzie Gillespie. While a star himself, Basquiat was free from the confines of traditional artistic production. He rebelled against the established and mainstream art world, and in doing so, he himself became the poster child for an entire generation of artists who positioned themselves against the status quo.

Michael Holman, gift of the artist. Gallozzi-La Placa Gallery, New York. Gallery Schlesinger-Boisante, Inc., New York. PS Gallery, Tokyo. Kenji Kobata, Tokyo. Adam Lindemann, New York. Private Collection, Paris. Acquired from the above by the present owner.

Tokyo, PS Gallery, Jean-Michel Basquiat, October-December 1987, p. 5 (illustrated in color). Tokyo, Mori Arts Center Gallery, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Made in Japan, September-November 2019, n.p. (illustrated in color).