By Theresa Rézeau

He looks directly at us.

His hair rises into the unmistakable silhouette that became part of his public image. Black paint surrounds a face crossed by red, orange, yellow and white. Lines interrupt the features without destroying them. The eyes remain clear.

This is Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988), painted by Johnny Blanco.

It is not a work by Basquiat, and it should not be mistaken for one. Yet the portrait offers an important place to begin because before the crowns, auction records, retrospectives and mythology, there was a person whose life lasted only twenty-seven years.

We like stories about dreams coming true. Basquiat’s story makes that language more complicated.

Born in Brooklyn on 22 December 1960 to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat grew up speaking English, Spanish and French. His mother encouraged his interest in art and took him to museums. After he was struck by a car at the age of eight, she gave him a copy of Gray’s Anatomy while he recovered. Its anatomical illustrations stayed with him, eventually resurfacing in a visual language filled with skulls, bones, organs, teeth and bodies whose interiors seem unwilling to remain hidden.

That early encounter with anatomy matters when we consider one of the most consequential paintings of his career. In 1982, Basquiat created Untitled, a monumental canvas dominated by a skull-like head against an electric blue field. Black marks construct and fracture the head while red, yellow and white move through it. The face appears exposed rather than conventionally portrayed, caught somewhere between skull, mask and living head.

We cannot see that painting reproduced here. Instead, we have Blanco’s later portrait of the artist himself. The distinction between those two images is useful. One gives us Basquiat’s face. The other gives us a head Basquiat painted, opened almost to the bone.

Between them sits the story of what happened when the dream arrived.

Before the galleries, there was SAMO. In the late 1970s, Basquiat and Al Diaz began placing cryptic statements around Lower Manhattan under the name, shorthand for “same old shit.” The phrases addressed commerce, religion, politics and cultural pretension with the compressed force of advertising turned against itself. Basquiat’s transition from those interventions into painting happened rapidly. By 1981, collectors were buying his work, and his first American solo exhibition followed in 1982.

Language followed him onto the canvas. Words appear and disappear across his paintings. Names are repeated. Lists sit beside bodies, symbols and diagrams. Phrases are crossed out without becoming illegible. Anatomy meets jazz, advertising, African and African American history, television, sport and art history. His paintings can look spontaneous while containing dense networks of information and reference.

Basquiat once explained that he crossed out words so that people would see them more. The gesture captures something important about his practice: erasure could become another form of emphasis.

The crown became one of his most recognisable motifs, often appearing above Black athletes, musicians and other figures. From the vantage point of the present, it is tempting to read that crown as prophecy, the young artist crowning himself before the art world eventually did the same. But hindsight makes symbols obedient. Basquiat’s crowns operate within paintings where elevation, vulnerability, fame, race and power are rarely simple.

The skull-like head of Untitled is similarly difficult to reduce. Its monumental scale gives it authority, yet its surface offers no serenity. The face is both commanding and exposed. The anatomy that entered Basquiat’s imagination through a childhood book has become something that refuses the clarity of a medical diagram.

That combination of visibility and exposure would acquire another meaning as Basquiat’s own public profile grew. His ascent through the New York art world was extraordinarily fast. By his early twenties he was exhibiting internationally, and by 1985 he appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine as the embodiment of the young artist flourishing inside a booming contemporary market.

For a young Black artist entering an establishment in which Black artists had long been marginalised, recognition did not eliminate the possibility of reduction. Basquiat’s work could be celebrated while descriptions of it emphasised rawness, instinct or primitivism, language carrying a much older history when applied to Black creativity.

The paintings themselves resist that simplification. Their accumulation of historical references, anatomy, words, diagrams, cultural figures and deliberate acts of erasure reveals an artist thinking through several systems at once. What initially appears chaotic can become remarkably controlled once we learn how to read it.

His relationship with Andy Warhol exposed the contradiction between visibility and recognition particularly sharply. The two became friends and collaborators during the 1980s, combining Warhol’s commercial imagery with Basquiat’s figures, marks and words. Yet the collaboration also became a site upon which critics projected hierarchy. Reviewing their joint 1985 exhibition for The New York Times, Vivian Raynor described Basquiat as Warhol’s “mascot.” The word reduced a recognised artist and collaborator to an accessory within another man’s celebrity. Basquiat could occupy the same canvas as one of the most famous artists alive and still find his authorship discussed through the gravitational pull of Warhol’s fame.

This is where the language of the dream begins to fracture. We tend to imagine success as a progression towards security: work hard enough, become good enough, receive recognition, and eventually the uncertainty diminishes. Achievement becomes somewhere safe to stand.

Basquiat’s life resists that neat progression. Visibility did not guarantee that he would be understood accurately. Commercial success could establish his importance while also making the artist himself increasingly available for projection, interpretation and consumption.

The image of the exposed head in Untitled becomes difficult to forget in this context. It would be irresponsible to claim that Basquiat painted a prediction of his own future into it. The painting does not give us access to his private thoughts, nor should biography be forced backwards into every mark. But the work does allow us to remain with a visual condition Basquiat returned to repeatedly: the body made visible beyond its surface.

Then the market added another layer. In May 2017, Untitled sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $110.5 million. Basquiat had been dead for twenty-nine years. At the time, the result was an auction record for an American artist and confirmed a level of market recognition unimaginable when the painting was created.

Once we know that number, it becomes difficult to encounter the painting without it. Untitled becomes the $110.5 million Basquiat. The auction enters the biography of an object created thirty-five years before the sale.

But the price belongs to 2017; the painting belongs to 1982.

That distinction matters because when Basquiat made the work, there was no nine-figure auction result waiting at the other end of the canvas. The enormous financial value now attached to it belongs to the afterlife of the work.

Basquiat’s own life ended on 12 August 1988, when he died of a heroin overdose at twenty-seven. His age has helped fold him into a broader mythology of brilliant artists and musicians who died young, but mythology can turn destruction into destiny. Addiction was not evidence of Basquiat’s genius, and his death was not a fee demanded in exchange for greatness.

To romanticise his destruction would be to confuse tragedy with artistic method. His work deserves something more difficult from us: the ability to recognise extraordinary achievement without turning suffering into proof of authenticity.

The dream did not cost him his life because great art requires suffering. That would make tragedy sound necessary. The cost worth examining is different: the distance between what success promises and what it can actually provide.

Recognition can give an artist an audience, but it cannot guarantee understanding. Money can change material circumstances without making a person invulnerable. Fame can ensure that a name is known while giving strangers extraordinary freedom to decide what that name means.

After death, success can become larger still.

Basquiat’s paintings are now held and exhibited by major institutions around the world, his influence extends across generations, and his market has reached heights few artists ever approach. The $110.5 million sale of Untitled belongs to that extraordinary posthumous ascent, but the artist himself was absent from the transaction that turned his work into an auction landmark.

There is something revealing in the fact that Untitled itself gives us a head rather than a mansion, money, a gallery opening or any of the conventional imagery through which success advertises itself. The face is difficult, exposed and impossible to settle into a single reading. Thirty-five years later, the market placed $110.5 million around it, but the number cannot complete the image. It cannot tell us what the painting means, what Basquiat’s life meant or whether the achievements accumulated around his name resembled anything he might have wanted for himself.

We do not know what he would have made of that future, and there is no need to invent an answer for him.

That is why Johnny Blanco’s portrait becomes useful again at the end. It gives us something the auction record cannot: the person behind it.

The marks crossing Blanco’s portrait do not erase Basquiat’s features. His eyes remain directed towards us. His hair forms the silhouette now recognised almost instantly around the world. Knowing the biography, we inevitably bring things to the image that it does not itself contain: SAMO, Warhol, the paintings, the addiction, the death, the exhibitions and the $110.5 million.

We know what happened next, but that knowledge belongs to us.

Legacy has a way of swallowing the person who produced it. Once an artist becomes an icon, the crown begins to look inevitable, the auction price begins to resemble destiny and the short life becomes part of the legend. Basquiat’s achievement does not require any of that mythology. In a career compressed into less than a decade, he developed a visual language of extraordinary force and placed histories, bodies and cultural figures into paintings that continue to resist easy interpretation.

The dream arrived in the form of recognition, influence and a permanent place in cultural history. What it could never provide was protection from being reduced, consumed or eventually transformed into a story told by people who survived him.

After the $110.5 million, after the crowns and the canonisation, after Untitled and its exposed head, we return to the image actually before us.

Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Twenty-seven years of life.
A face still looking back.