Jean-Michel Basquiat made *Untitled* in New York in 1982, at the age of twenty-two. The year is considered his most productive; he had abandoned his 'SAMO' graffiti tag the year before and entered the gallery system, quickly becoming one of the most sought-after figures of the New York SoHo scene.

The canvas (183 × 173 cm, acrylic and mixed media) is a depiction of a skull, directly facing the viewer — but Basquiat's hand is not the exercise of a classical vanitas. Over the skull he sets rhymes, arrows, X-ray-like internal lines, letters, child-drawing-like figures. White, yellow, red, and blue strokes overlap; some look erased, but the erasure is also a stroke. The canvas is closed, dense, and open to many readings.

Basquiat's themes are explicit: Black identity, police violence, blues and jazz, New York street life, anatomy (his mother had given him a copy of Gray's *Anatomy*), and the Caribbean roots of his Haitian and Puerto Rican family. The three-pointed crown he often paints on faces is his signature — his homage to his heroes (Charlie Parker, Sugar Ray Robinson, Muhammad Ali).

Basquiat died in his New York studio in 1988 at the age of 27 from a heroin overdose. *Untitled (Skull)* is today in The Broad collection in Los Angeles. Another *Untitled* by him from the same year (a skull on a blue ground) sold at Sotheby's in 2017 for $110.5 million — at the time the highest sum for any American artist, living or dead.

Basquiat became Andy Warhol's friend and collaborator; that friendship is read as a symbol of contemporary art's passage 'from the street to the gallery, from white institutions to Black life'.