Jean-Michel Basquiat regularly celebrated in his work the anonymous black man. There are only a handful of paintings, however, in which he explicitly depicted himself. The present lot, his 1985 self-portrait, is therefore a rare, mature autobiographical work. In it, he presents himself as a haunted, dread-locked and ghostly figure with hollow eyes. Outlined in red, Basquiat’s powerfully expressive bust is all the more stunning for its simplicity of execution with its economy of means using simple lines and forms capturing the face and upper body of the artist. The flat and frontal depiction of the mask-like head is energized by ragged brushstrokes of dripping black pigment and smeared oil stick. Conveying tremendous fear and anger, Basquiat’s torso, which lacks any limbs, is savagely torn from the rest of his body below the chest. In its honest, even brutal self-portrayal, this self-portrait is reminiscent of Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear. It is an extraordinarily disarming portrayal of the 25-year-old African-American artist who by this point of his tragically brief career had already risen to the very top of the art world only to find himself consumed by a crippling sense of paranoia as well as a debilitating drug habit which would lead to his eventual fatal overdose. In September 1983, Basquiat’s friend and fellow African American New York graffiti artist, Michael Stewart, while vandalizing a station, was arrested by a group of white subway transit police officers and beaten into a coma. Stewart died of his wounds and the ensuing trial and acquittal of the officers by an all-white jury sparked a debate of police brutality and stirred up considerable racial tension. Basquiat, already very unstable through excessive drug use, grew even more paranoid, believing that he could be the next victim. His rarefied position as a black male in an all-white art world made him suspicious of everyone in his immediate circle and his paintings began to reflect a much darker mood in which death and martyrdom, expressed in a simple, economical aesthetic, would take centre stage. Self-Portrait can therefore be understood as Basquiat’s religious diptych, his contemporary Byzantine icon. It comprises two hinged tablets, on the left panel of which he depicts himself as a Christ-like martyr figure while the other panel is a magnificently ornamental found-wooden construction covered with shimmering metallic bottle caps and pure swathes of yellow, red and green paint. This is a scene from the urban gospel which tells of a tormented artist torn between his reality as an African American artist manipulated by the white art world and his ideal as a martyr for the cause of the black man in American society. Highly personal and reflective, Basquiat’s splintered sense of self is evident in the built-up angst and aggression of his self-portrait and the tranquil and peaceful beauty of the abstracted right-hand panel. It is a contemporary tabernacle, a reliquary of hope and loss, in which Basquiat communicates with himself exercising his inner most demons.