Painted in 1987, just a year prior to his untimely death, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (Devil’s head) exhibits the artist’s distinct aesthetic vision and characteristic subject matter: the skull. In the present lot, Basquiat offers two mirrored skulls in black, white and blazing red, one echoing the other in asymmetric balance. In their rendering, these bare-teethed skulls, executed in the artist’s characteristic, active brushwork, interplay against a lustrous metallic background. Conceived at the end of his career, this work occupies a unique space as the millennium neared, provoking us to reflect on the changed nature that Basquiat’s work took towards the end of his practice. Indeed Untitled (Devil’s head) pulls from the same themes evident in the artist’s very last painting, created just a year later in 1988, Riding with Death. In 1987, the artist had just witnessed the death of his dear friend and contemporary Andy Warhol, and was just a year from his own. The darkness in his life that prevailed might explain the meditative backgrounds of both of these late works, and the motifs of death and the devil.

Aesthetically, the present lot reflects the artist’s two key influences pulled from throughout his oeuvre. The skull harkens back to one of Basquiat’s first sources, a book on anatomy given to him by his mother in 1968 after surviving an almost-fatal car accident. While abstract, Basquiat’s skulls are rendered with a semblance of scientific accuracy in their structure and emphasis on the individual parts that make up the body, evident here in his rendering of the teeth and nasal cavities. Like Francis Bacon, there exists a psychological pulse in the stylized way that this anatomical influence was expressed, belonging to the unique intersection of abstraction and figuration. In Untitled (Devil’s head), Basquiat also harkens back to the art historical canon with which he was so fascinated, not only in the tribal motifs exhibited in the contours of the skulls’ heads and the arrow-like lines framing the composition, but also in the metallic surface of the background, which recalls Renaissance compositions and Byzantine mosaics.

The amalgamation of influences Basquiat refers to are, in typical fashion, infused with the urbanization of 1980s New York City, however they appear to be distinctly different from the frenetic canvases of Basquiat’s early works. Here, Basquiat rejects background noise of text and music for sublime reflection. As such, the composition of open-mouthed devils reflects not only the artist’s inspirations, but also speaks to the autobiographical nature of his work, perhaps acting as a metaphor for the artist’s late life. As Phoebe Hoban explains, “In Basquiat's paintings, boys never become men, they become skeletons and skulls. Presence is expressed as absence--whether it's in the spectral bodies and disembodied skulls he paints or the words he crosses out…His work is the ultimate expression of a profound sense of "no there there," a deep hole in the soul.” (Pheobe Hoban, Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, London, 1998)