Untitled
Date1981
MediumOil stick, acrylic, and spray enamel on canvas
Dimensions78 x 68 in. (198.1 x 172.7 cm)
ClassificationsPainting
Credit LinePromised Gift to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
Label TextJean-Michel Basquiat’s painting is rich with cultural and personal references. The crown, representing kingship, was one of the artist’s signature images. The artist used the black man crowned with thorns throughout his work as a universal symbol for a spiritually superior human being. In this painting, the figure, who displays a fish and wears a barbed-wire crown, symbolizes the Biblical Christ advising his followers to be “fishers of men,” or to spread the word of the Christian God. Additionally, scrawled red letters in the upper right may refer to Xerxes, a great king in ancient Persia. This image may also connect to the artist’s Haitian heritage: the figure could represent a Bokor, a Haitian voodoo priest who applies gray ashes to his body and concocts a deadly potion with the poison of the pufferfish.
In the 1970s, Basquiat made graffiti under the name SAMO on the streets of New York. In the early 1980s, he joined other influential artists of the time like Keith Haring (whose work is displayed nearby) in merging traditional painting with street-art-inspired styles.
