Jean-Michel Basquiat is renowned for his fascination with popular printed materials such as comic books, advertisements and the medical text book Gray’s Anatomy, all of which comprise a visual lexicon of motifs and symbols that he continuously weaved throughout his paintings and drawings. He frequently reused and re-imagined these disparate graphic symbols, turning them into striking visual combinations sprinkled with poetic snippets, resulting in an artistic vocabulary that is simultaneously esoteric, elegant, and purposely naïve. The present lot,Untitled (1987), was created just one year before Basquiat’s death and depicts the multitude of the extracted motifs and signifiers for which he is so well known. Like much of his work from this era, this drawing references graphic symbols from Henry Dreyfuss’s 1972 Symbol Sourcebook. As R.D Marshall states, “This organized, codified, and identified system of containing information was particularly suited to Basquiat’s artistic style of quick and emblematic art making.” (R. D. Marshall as quoted in Enrico Navarra, ed., Jean-Michel Basquiat: Oeuvres sur Papier, Paris, 1999, p.42).

For Basquiat, these symbols represented the world at its most basic level. As an ensemble, they generate an intellectual equation made even more mystical and mysterious by its pointed lack of color. Although they may be equations, they are not meant to be solved or deciphered through any linear formula. In creating and destroying, in scribbling and crossing out, Basquiat deters a definitive decoding of his work, leaving it open to infinite permutations and interpretative possibilities. In this way, he created “a calculated incoherence, calibrating the mystery of what such apparently meaning-laden pictures might ultimately mean.” (Mark Meyer, “Basquiat in History”, Basquiat, exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum of Art, 2005, p.51).