“Every single line means something.”

—Jean-Michel Basquiat

Executed between 1985 and 1986, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled offers a vivid view into the artist’s energetic, imaginative, and ingenious mind. This work illustrates a vibrant symphony of densely layered motifs and symbols characteristic of Basquiat’s multifaceted practice. A masterful blend of figuration and abstraction sprawls across the page like cryptic runes from an undiscovered world, reflecting Basquiat’s diverse interests: anatomical charts, bebop and jazz, language fragments, and semiotic structures. He merges image and text, revealing and concealing meaning, lifting iconography from its usual context and layering it with crossed-out and repeated fragments. Basquiat’s works on paper possess a raw immediacy that allows his creative brilliance to emerge unfiltered. The limitations of the medium—where overpainting is not possible—make works like this a direct and unmediated record of the artist’s visionary thinking. In Untitled, Basquiat’s partial erasures and incomplete passages highlight the rapidity of his process, yielding a dynamic and deeply personal artifact. The work’s distinctive, freeform articulations stand as enduring traces of a brief but incandescent life. 

A thrilling rediscovery never before offered at auction, Untitled stands as a large-scale, intricately layered work that captures the expansive scope of Basquiat’s imagination and his relentless drive to innovate across disciplines. Notably, the painting was formerly in the collection of Willi Smith, the most high-profile Black fashion designer of the 1980s and founder of the influential label WilliWear. Often credited with pioneering a form of proto-streetwear—what Smith himself called "street couture"—he revolutionized fashion by creating accessible, collaborative, youth-driven designs that blurred the lines between art, performance, and everyday life. A creative force who worked with artists such as Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Nam June Paik, Keith Haring, and Spike Lee, Smith embodied a spirit of boundary-crossing innovation that resonates with Basquiat’s own artistic ethos. According to model and close friend Bethann Hardison, “[Smith] was passionate about art. He surrounded himself with work by the artists he loved.”ⁱ Hardison even helped Smith acquire paintings by the young Basquiat, recalling: “Back in the day, Willi asked me to help him buy some Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings. I knew Jean-Michel, and Willi was already established at that point and had some money to spend.”ⁱⁱ In Smith’s eclectic and visionary collection, Basquiat’s Untitled found a fitting home, bridging two groundbreaking talents who reshaped the cultural landscape of their time.

Untitled revisits techniques Basquiat explored after his engagement with Xerox-based art. By 1983, collage became central to his process as he integrated photocopies into his paintings. The photocopier became such a vital tool that he acquired a personal color machine for his studio. Inspired by William S. Burroughs’ “cut-up” technique, Basquiat spliced and reassembled fragments into layered compositions enhanced with text, symbols, and imagery. Notably, this work reappears in four significant large-scale paintings: Harlem paper product, 1987; Icarus Esso, 1986; Dogman, 1986; and Untitled, 1984-1985.

“Drawing, for [Basquiat], was something you did rather than something done, an activity rather than a medium… [He] kept the best for constant reference and re-use. Or, kept them because they were, quite simply, indestructibly vivid.”

—Robert Storr

The present drawing represents a confident assertion of Basquiat’s draftsmanship and instinctive storytelling. The frenetic energy in his works on paper, evident in Untitled, differs from that of his paintings—here, expression is immediate, raw, and intense. Drawing was Basquiat’s most direct mode of translating his thoughts. Evocative of Cy Twombly—whom he admired—Basquiat’s marks suggest a proto-handwriting, an elusive language suspended between legibility and pure symbolism. As Phoebe Hoban writes, “Basquiat’s work, like that of most of his peers, was based on appropriation… the images he appropriated whether they were from the Bible or a chemistry textbook – became part of his original vocabulary.”ⁱⁱⁱ  Through recursive anatomy, television, history, and Black culture, Basquiat constructed a symbolic system all his own. 

The visual intensity of Untitled reflects Basquiat’s drive and meteoric success. The work displays his mature visual lexicon: a densely worked surface where incised oilstick marks create rich textural dimensions. Fred Hoffman notes, “With the exception of Picasso, few acclaimed painters of the Twentieth Century invested the same time or energy to works on paper... For Basquiat... there is often less of a distinction... between working on paper and on canvas.”^iv 

“[Basquiat’s] works have a quality that seems to draw you in; it is like they offered some kind of clue to solving the puzzle of what’s in his mind. It sounds easy, but it is quite difficult for an artist to achieve that. The words, symbols and body parts that he uses all come together to form an expression of what he is thinking of as an artist”

—Jeffrey Deitch

Using both rapid gestures and precise detail, Basquiat blends text and image. Shifting between black, white, and color, he maps anatomy—the brain’s “FORNIX” and “LYRA”—and the torso of a guitar player, detailed but with a scribbled spinal column. In neuroanatomy, "Lyra" refers to a structure within the fornix, its name inspired by a triangular harp. This subtle reference—tied to Basquiat’s fascination with anatomy and music—exemplifies his ability to fuse scientific and artistic domains. His mother, Mathilde, nurtured these dual interests, introducing him to museums and gifting him Gray’s Anatomy (1878) after a childhood car accident. This event, which resulted in the removal of his spleen, profoundly influenced his recurring interest in the human body. He later recalled: “It seemed very dreamlike... just like the movies... seeing everything through sort of a red filter... I think I remember pretty much all of it.”^v 

In Untitled, detailed renderings of the throat and jaw highlight Basquiat’s stream-of-consciousness style—a careful balance of urgency and coherence. While anatomically investigative, the work also autobiographically surveys Basquiat’s oeuvre, referencing pieces such as the Brooklyn Museum’s Back of the Neck, 1983; Horn Players, 1983, at the Broad, Los Angeles; Jawbone of an Ass, 1982; and Monticello, 1986. Shared across these are themes of deconstructed anatomy, Black musicians, and biblical references. In Jawbone of an Ass, the title derives from Samson’s legendary feat—a gesture of strength and divine favor—reflecting Basquiat’s engagement with spiritual and mythological content. Here, Neptune is also depicted, identified by the label “NEPTUNE” and a figure with classical attributes, reinforcing mythic themes.

Historical and technical references further permeate Untitled. A bat wing in the lower half mirrors Leonardo da Vinci’s studies of flight, reflecting Basquiat’s polymathic interests. Inspired by Henry Dreyfuss’ Symbol Sourcebook (1972), Basquiat incorporated graphic and engineering symbols—visible here in the circular mechanical diagrams paired with river names like “MISSISSIPPI,” “OHIO,” and “HUDSON.” The repetition of “FLOW AND EBB” and “OF WAVES // OF RIVERS” links anatomy, myth, and machinery to a hydrodynamic metaphor of movement and memory. 

Trademark and copyright symbols—ubiquitous in Basquiat’s work—appear throughout, referencing authorship and ownership. These markings also echo his graffiti roots and his use of the SAMO tag. The work’s central figures—a trumpet player labeled “AS GABRIEL // GABRIEL FIG.” and a guitarist in a blue suit—connect Basquiat to music and spirituality. The archangel Gabriel, associated with the trumpet and divine announcements, may also serve as a metaphor for the artist himself—a messenger, performer, witness, or even avatar. The central guitarist, faceless save for a floating brain, evokes sound through color and gesture. Capitalized words across the composition suggest rhythm, while scribbled-out passages heighten textual ambiguity, mirroring the improvisational spirit of jazz. Repetition, a core technique in both Basquiat’s work and jazz, reinforces this connection. Francesco Pellizzi described his text works as “poetry pent up inside vibrating boxes... like revealed mysteries... emerging from our ever more chaotic forests of language.”^vi

Created during a pivotal period in the artist’s short yet prolific career, Untitled captures Basquiat’s creative expansion and growing confidence in his role as an artist, at a time when he was gaining international recognition and staging major museum exhibitions. In 1985, Basquiat experienced a landmark year, marked by a major show at the prestigious Mary Boone Gallery, a New York Times Magazine cover feature, and a collaborative exhibition with Andy Warhol. In a filmed interview on 19 October 1985 for State of the Art, a television series directed by Geoff Dunlop, Basquiat was asked about the media attention he had come to expect as a leading figure in the New York art scene. He replied, “It makes you too regular, and you don’t want to be… I want clarity but I also want to have some sort of obscurity… I want it to be sort of more cryptic, the work in some way you know.”^vii

The desire to communicate through his art while resisting categorization is powerfully evident in Untitled, where the artist’s unbounded curiosity and exceptional storytelling unfold across the page. An exquisite example of Basquiat’s signature Neo-Expressionist style and his commitment to reimagining the myths of past and present, Untitled—with its scrawled anatomical renderings and lyrical text—serves as both a mirror of his career to that point and a portrait of his imaginative, restless mind.

ⁱ Bethann Hardison, quoted in “Community Archive,” The Willi Smith Digital Community Archive, n.d., online.
ⁱⁱ Ibid.
ⁱⁱⁱ Phoebe Hoban, Basquiat: A Quick Killing in Art, New York, 1998, p. 332.
^iv Fred Hoffmann, Jean-Michel Basquiat Drawing: Works from the Schorr Family Collection, New York, 2014, p. 33.
^v Jean Michel Basquiat, quoted in Jean-Michel Basquiat, Basel, 2010, p. XXII.
^vi Francesco Pelizzi, “Black and White All Over: Poetry and Desolation Painting,” Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York, 1989, p. 15.
^vii Jean-Michel Basquiat, quoted in “Filmed interview conducted on 19 October 1985 for State of the Art, television series directed by Geoff Dunlop, produced by John Wyver and written by Sandy Nairne, Illuminations, UK. Episode broadcast on Channel 4, 11 January 1987;” transcript available through The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, online.