Untitled

Jean-Michel Basquiat

1985 · Graphite, colored pencils, oilstick, acrylic, torn and pasted papers on paper · Modern and Contemporary Art

Basquiat, who grew up in Brooklyn the child of Puerto Rican and Haitian parents, rose to fame in the early 1980s as part of the street graffiti scene of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Known first by the tag name SAMO ("SAMe Old shit"), Basquiat was a skilled painter whose large-scale works and drawings combined clever wordplay in English, French, and Spanish with a panoply of signature images in bright colors. Here, in his characteristic all-caps hand, the artist inscribed stream-of-consciousness spills of words on slips of notepaper, assembling them with delicate drawings of animal skeletons.

Artist

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Date

1985

Medium

Graphite, colored pencils, oilstick, acrylic, torn and pasted papers on paper

Department

Modern and Contemporary Art

Credit line

Gift of the Estate of the artist, 1992