Untitled (Skull)
A roughly drawn skull in acrylic and oil stick on canvas — its top opened to reveal a brain, its jaw distorted with frenzied lines and symbols — confronts the viewer with visceral immediacy. Basquiat's working method was urgent and layered: text, symbols, figures, and marks in multiple languages and registers accumulated into a visual diary that drew simultaneously on comics, West African cosmology, anatomy textbooks, and the graffiti of New York City streets.
Basquiat is the most important American painter to emerge from the 1980s downtown New York art scene, and Untitled (Skull) sold for $110.5 million in 2017, making it the highest price ever paid for an American artist at auction. His work introduced Black experience, colonial history, and the visual language of the street into the art market's most elite venues, permanently altering the demographics of whose voices the contemporary art world could accommodate.
Basquiat emerged from the graffiti movement that transformed New York's walls in the late 1970s, beginning as SAMO on the Lower East Side before being discovered by gallerist Annina Nosei and subsequently Andy Warhol. His rise from homeless street artist to $100,000-a-painting art world darling in the span of four years was a microcosm of the Reagan era's extreme inequality — his death from a heroin overdose at 27 in 1988 an equally pointed commentary.