The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Jean-Michel Basquiat · Untitled, known as Untitled (Skull) · one painting scored as one object, a single canvas · acrylic and oilstick on canvas, upright · one frontal head filling most of the field · New York, 1981 · The Broad, Los Angeles · whole, as painted, with nothing known to be lost, replaced or restored
Mode
Figure painting at the scale of the heroic head, drawn at speed; portrait, memento mori and anatomical diagram in one image
Mythos
The vanitas and the death’s head, the mask and the icon, the ancestral head: the double image of face and skull built in one figure, the rest evoked
Phase
Painted in 1981, the painter’s first full year on canvas, after the SAMO inscriptions of 1977 to 1980; he was twenty or twenty-one
Presentation
One upright canvas in acrylic and oilstick; one frontal head in heavy black line over a ground worked in broad strokes of saturated colour; no attached object
Register
Dreadful and hot: a stare returned by something alive and dead at once, given at full strength in one encounter
Scale
One head, larger than the head of the one who looks; a person, a body, a death and a way of being seen
Governing Proposition
One head fills an upright canvas painted in 1981, Basquiat’s first full year as a painter on canvas: frontal, staring, its features drawn in heavy black, its teeth bared, its interior opened into a tangle of lines that read as anatomy, wiring or circuitry. The face looks back, and through it the skull and the workings show. The wager of the painting is that a person seen and a body that will die can be drawn as one image with one line, that a head opened in this way discloses a condition of being looked at, and that the speed of the drawing can carry that claim without the care of an anatomy plate.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The painting has no title. Basquiat painted it in 1981, in acrylic and oilstick on an upright canvas, and left it Untitled; “Skull” is a descriptive name in use, not the artist’s. It is held by The Broad in Los Angeles, the collection of Eli and Edythe Broad. The work scored is that one canvas, as it stands now. It is not the skull-head painting of 1982 on a blue ground, which is a different object, and the other heads Basquiat painted in 1981 and 1982 are context, not part of the work. No part of it is known to be lost, replaced or restored, and nothing stands in place of an original.
What it shows is one large frontal head, filling most of the canvas, at once a living face and a skull. Its outline and features are drawn in heavy black. Its interior is opened into a tangle of lines, hatchings and loops that read as anatomy, wiring or circuitry. The eyes are ringed and staring; the jaw is set with bared teeth. Around the head the ground is worked in broad strokes of saturated colour. There is one canvas, one figure and no attached object, and the head is larger than the head of anyone who stands before it.
What it brings into the open can be stated, and that lifts it above mood. A head is shown from outside and from inside at once: a face that looks back and, under it and through it, the skull and the workings. The person seen and the body that will die are one image. That is a meaning, and it is in the canvas. It is also the whole of the canvas’s argument: the disclosure is made by one figure and one move, and the painting neither divides it nor develops it. It is said at once, and then held.
Movement II
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in 1960 and died in 1988. From 1977 to 1980 he wrote the SAMO inscriptions on the walls of New York; 1981 was his first full year as a painter on canvas, and he was twenty or twenty-one when he painted this head. The line that enters the large painting here came from the street, and it enters at a scale the street did not give it: a head larger than the viewer’s, on a canvas meant for a gallery wall.
The inheritance is wide. Picasso’s masks are behind the head, Dubuffet and Art Brut behind the rawness, Twombly’s scrawl behind the line, and with them the anatomical plate, the comic and the street. In its own moment, large figurative and gestural painting was returning in New York and Europe and was already being sold as a wave. The departure is to bring the graffiti line, the diagram and the anatomy plate into the heroic head on a large canvas, without the polish of the Neo-Expressionist figure and without irony, and to put a Black head at the centre of a kind of painting where it had seldom been the subject. The stake was real: a painter without training, coming into the gallery from the street, risked being read as a primitive or as a fashion.
The turn was shared with the season’s revival of the figure and of the gesture, and this one canvas did not pay for it in full. Its field is New York painting in the early 1980s, between the end of the Minimal and Conceptual decade, the return of the figure and the arrival of graffiti in the galleries, and its force in that field is real: it shows what a figure could now be made of, and it puts a Black subject at the centre as a matter of course. Basquiat’s reach on later painting, on figuration with text and diagram and on the place of Black artists in the field is wide and documented, and this head is among its emblematic images. But the reach belongs chiefly to the body of work, which this canvas begins rather than gathers; that it in particular redirected others is not shown, and some of its reach is the reach of the market.
Movement III
The instrument of the painting is a drawing that does not distinguish surface from interior. The same black line draws the outline of the face and the wiring inside it, at the same speed and at the same weight, so that the eye cannot keep skin and skull apart. A careful anatomical rendering would separate the layers and lose the claim; a smaller canvas would lose the confrontation. The rawness of the mark is not a manner laid over a content. It is how the head is opened, and changing it would change what the painting knows.
The making is load-bearing, and its command is of a particular kind. The black line is drawn at speed, with no hesitation and no correction visible, and holds the whole head together at a large scale. The oilstick is worked over the acrylic so that line and colour stay separate and both stay alive, and the colour of the ground is set at full saturation without muddying against the head. Training is not the measure here; command is. The range of means is narrow, and some passages are worked more as energy than as decision. One figure tests the control of a whole surface less than a field of many parts would.
Speed is part of the meaning, and speed always leaves surplus. The head, the ringed eyes and the teeth cannot go. The tangle inside is required as a field, because the claim is that the head is open, but not stroke by stroke: many single marks could go or be placed otherwise and the painting would say the same. The ground is needed as pressure, a colour for the head to stand against, and in places it is more energy than structure. One law governs the rest: everything is drawn at the same depth, the contour that is the edge of a person and the diagram that is an interior no person sees, equally visible and equally made of line. The ground obeys that law less clearly than the head.
Movement IV
The teeth are the painting’s plainest case: one row that is a smile and a death’s head at once. The eyes look out and are sockets. Every feature serves both the living face and the skull, in the same lines. That double image is the oldest structure of the vanitas, and here it is made load-bearing in a single figure rather than placed beside one. Round it gather the memento mori and Golgotha, the mask, the icon and the ancestral head, and these are summoned rather than built. The particular stays particular: a contemporary head, drawn fast, not a generic skull.
Facing the canvas, the viewer meets a head larger than the viewer’s own, frontal and staring, its teeth bared. The effect is a stare returned by something both alive and dead, with the force of a mask or an icon, and the saturated ground and the violence of the black line give it heat rather than chill. The elevation is of the dreadful kind, and it is real. It comes at once and at full strength. Looking longer deepens the detail of the interior more than it raises a second height: the painting gives one summit, and holds it.
Painted by a young Black artist in New York in 1981, a frontal Black head stripped to its interior also discloses a condition of being looked at: the face as mask, the body as specimen, the self as exposed machinery, a figure made visible only as anatomy. The painting does not state this, and it is not charged for not stating it; it shows it. But the social meaning is carried as much by what is known of the maker as by what the canvas itself articulates, and that, with the single move, is what keeps the disclosure short of the highest marks.
Movement V
Forty-five years on, the image is whole as painted. Nothing of its arrangement is known to be lost or replaced, and no restoration is recorded. It is held at The Broad in Los Angeles, one of the major private collections turned public, and it is reproduced widely; fame and price are presence, not proof. Acrylic and oilstick are younger and less tested than oil on a prepared ground, and oilstick surfaces can be delicate, a general risk charged lightly. The surface is fixed to no technology and no topical event.
The questions it sustains are real, and the literature on Basquiat grew sharply after his death and again with the retrospectives of recent decades. Is the head a self-portrait, a portrait of a type, or a portrait of no one? Is the open head anatomy, machine or spirit? Is the skull death, or the ancestor? How far is the painting about being seen as a Black artist in a white market, and how far about the body under any skin? The image yields on return in the detail of its interior. Much of the return, though, goes to the maker’s life, death and market rather than to this canvas.
The head holds the body and its anatomy, death, a consciousness that stares back, race and the condition of being seen, the city faintly in a line from the street, and the sacred in the mask and the skull, and it integrates them in one image. Outside the head there is nothing: no family, no labour, no state, no natural order. On the desk it stands at 7.9, level with Richter’s Uncle Rudi (7.9) and above Johns’s According to What (7.7); below Kiefer’s Margarethe (8.2), painted in the same year, which builds a poem and a nation’s history into its matter where this canvas holds one head; and above the other skull on the desk, Hirst’s For the Love of God (7.5), which restates the vanitas in its materials where this one builds it into a living face. What holds it below Tier IV is not a failure but a measure: one figure and one move, which bring four of the five epochal axes to 7.9 or 8.0 and leave the aggregate short of 8.0.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test falls on the marks inside and around the head. The head itself resists removal entirely: it is the work. The frame of its features, the ringed eyes and the teeth are required, since they are where face and skull meet. Inside, the tangle of lines is required as a field, because the painting’s claim is that the head is open, but not mark by mark: many single strokes could go, or be placed otherwise, and the work would say the same. The ground is needed as pressure, a colour for the head to stand against, and is in places more energy than structure. Speed is part of the meaning, and speed leaves surplus.
Score: 7.6 / 10
What the painting brings into the open can be stated, which lifts it above mood. A head is shown from outside and inside at once: a face that looks back and, under it and through it, the skull and the workings, so that the person seen and the body that will die are one image. Painted by a young Black artist in New York in 1981, a frontal Black head stripped to its interior also discloses a condition of being looked at: the face as mask, the body as specimen, a figure made visible only as anatomy. The canvas shows this without stating it. What holds the axis is that the disclosure rests on one figure and one move, and that its social meaning is carried as much by what is known of the maker as by the canvas.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The elevation is of the dreadful kind, and it is real. Facing the canvas, the head is larger than the viewer’s, frontal and staring, its teeth bared: a stare returned by something both alive and dead, with the force of a mask or an icon. The saturated ground and the violence of the black line give it heat rather than chill. What holds the axis is range and frequency. The painting gives one encounter, at once and at full strength, and looking longer deepens the detail of the interior more than it raises a second height. Against a work that rises again and again across a field or a duration, this is one summit, held.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The skull carries the memento mori, Golgotha and the vanitas; the frontal staring head carries the mask, the icon and the ancestral head. Much of that is evoked. What is built is one structure: the head as living face and death’s head in the same lines, so that each feature serves both, the eye and its socket, the teeth as smile and as skull. That double image, the oldest structure of the vanitas, is made load-bearing in a single figure rather than placed beside it. The particular stays particular: a contemporary head drawn fast, not a generic skull. What holds the axis is that the archetype is built in one move, and the rest of the deep is summoned, not constructed.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is wide: Picasso’s masks, Dubuffet and Art Brut, Twombly’s scrawl, the anatomical plate, the comic and the street, and, in its own moment, the return of large figurative painting in New York and Europe, already being sold as a wave. The departure is to bring the graffiti line, the diagram and the anatomy plate into the heroic head on a large canvas, without the polish of the Neo-Expressionist figure and without irony, and to put a Black head at the centre of a kind of painting where it had seldom been the subject. The stake was real: a painter without training, entering the gallery from the street, risked being read as a primitive or a fashion. But the turn was shared with the season’s revival of the figure and the gesture.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Change the form and what the work knows changes much. Its knowledge is that surface and interior are seen at once, and the instrument is a drawing that does not distinguish them: the same black line draws the outline of the face and the wiring inside it, at the same speed and weight, so that the eye cannot keep skin and skull apart. A careful anatomical rendering would separate the layers and lose the claim; a smaller canvas would lose the confrontation, a head larger than the one who looks. The rawness of the mark is not a manner laid over a content: it is how the head is opened. What holds the axis is that parts of the ground and of the inner tangle could be otherwise without the work knowing less.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Evidence over promise: forty-five years, and a literature on Basquiat that grew sharply after his death in 1988 and again with the retrospectives of recent decades. The questions this canvas sustains are real. Is it a self-portrait, a portrait of a type, or a portrait of no one? Is the open head anatomy, machine or spirit? Is the skull death, or the ancestor? How far is it about being seen as a Black artist in a white market, and how far about the body under any skin? The image yields on return in the detail of the interior. Held below 8 because much of the return is to the maker’s life, death and market rather than to this canvas, which holds less detail than a work built over months.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The field is painting in New York in the early 1980s, between the end of the Minimal and Conceptual decade, the return of the figure and the arrival of graffiti in the galleries. The intrinsic force is real: the painting joins the street line, the diagram and the frontal head on a large canvas in a way that redirects what a figure in painting could be made of, and puts a Black subject at its centre as a matter of course. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Basquiat’s reach on later painting, on figuration with text and diagram and on the place of Black artists in the field is wide and documented, and this head is among its emblematic images. But that reach belongs chiefly to the body of work, which this canvas begins rather than gathers, and some of it is the market’s.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at forty-five years. Form: the image is whole as painted; nothing of its defining arrangement is known to be lost or replaced, and no restoration is recorded. Presence: it is held at The Broad in Los Angeles, one of the major private collections turned public, and is reproduced widely; that is wide presence, though fame and price are presence, not proof. Fabric: acrylic and oilstick are younger and less tested materials than oil on a prepared ground, and oilstick surfaces can be delicate; the risk is general and is charged lightly. The surface is not fixed to a technology or a topical event. Whole in form, wide in presence, lightly charged on fabric.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged as command of acrylic and oilstick on a large canvas. The command is high and of a particular kind: the black line drawn at speed with no hesitation and no correction visible, holding the whole head together at a large scale; the oilstick worked over the acrylic so that line and colour stay separate and both stay alive; the colour of the ground set at full saturation without muddying against the head. The making is load-bearing, since the painting’s argument depends on the line’s speed and certainty. Training is not the measure; command is. Held below the higher marks because the range of means is narrow, some passages are worked more as energy than as decision, and one figure tests the control of a whole surface less than a field would.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the outer contour of the face, which is the edge of a person, and the diagram inside it, an interior no person sees. They obey one law, the one the image enacts: everything is drawn at the same depth, so that the outside and the inside of the head are equally visible and equally made of line. The same law governs the teeth, which are smile and skull, and the eyes, which look and are sockets. The ground obeys it less clearly: it is pressure and colour more than a further case of the law. Narrowness is not coherence, and the territory is one head; but within it the law reaches from skin to wiring, and that is a real range.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The orders held: the body and its anatomy; death; consciousness, in a head that stares back; race and the condition of being seen, through the subject and its making; the city, faintly, in a line that came from the street; the sacred and the ancestral, evoked in the mask and the skull. One image integrates them, the head opened, and the integration is achieved. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what lies outside the head: no family, no labour, no state, no history beyond what the maker’s person implies, and no natural order. A single figure on a single canvas: the low figure describes the form, and it is not a charge against what the head holds.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Made at 8.3, and The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.1. A canvas whole as painted after forty-five years and widely present, its acrylic and oilstick charged lightly; a black line drawn at speed with no correction visible, holding a head larger than its viewer; and one law, outside and inside the head drawn at the same depth by the same line, so that skin and skull cannot be held apart.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: the body, death, consciousness, race and the condition of being seen are held in one opened head, and nothing lies outside it, no family, no labour, no state, no natural order. Next above it, The Inevitable at 7.6: the head, the eyes and the teeth are required, but many strokes of the inner tangle and parts of the ground could go or move without loss. Then The Sublime at 7.8: one encounter at full strength, and no second height. Below the epochal bar, The Unconcealment at 7.9 and The Archetypal Deep, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 each rest on one figure and one move, and the reach that is wide belongs chiefly to the body of work.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.1, The Made at 8.3, The Inner Law at 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep, The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 fall short by five tenths, and The Unconcealment at 7.9 by six. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 94.9, an average of 7.908 that displays 7.9. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.9, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled, 1981, known as Untitled (Skull), acrylic and oilstick on canvas, held by The Broad, Los Angeles; known chiefly through reproduction and the published account of the painting, not from standing before it, and no image or written source was consulted for this page. The work scored is the single canvas as one object, as it stands now: it is whole, nothing in it is known to be lost, replaced, restored or reworked by another hand, and nothing stands in place of an original. It is not the skull-head painting of 1982 on a blue ground, a different object not weighed here; the other heads of 1981 and 1982 are context, and are not scored. The image is known well as a whole and thinly in its details: the distribution of the colours of the ground, any words on the surface and the marks in the corners are not described, and the judgment of the making and of what could be removed allows for that. The work is untitled; “Skull” is a descriptive name in use. No words of Basquiat’s are quoted, and no inscription or document is quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the dimensions of the canvas, the date at which it entered the collection and how long it has been on view, an account of the painter’s childhood often given for his anatomical drawing, the particulars of his family’s descent, and which later painters descend from this canvas in particular.