Jean-Michel Basquiat's Superhero Portfolio takes on one of America's most exported mythologies — the figure of the superhero, born in the late 1930s at the intersection of economic depression and the gathering threat of war, offering a fantasy of individual power that could correct injustice in a society unable to correct itself. Superman arrived in 1938, Batman in 1939, Captain America in 1941. These were not innocent entertainments. They were a culture's attempt to imagine a kind of justice its institutions were failing to deliver, and they encoded, in the process, a very specific idea of who got to be the hero and who needed saving.

Across the four screenprints — Riddle Me This, A Panel of Experts, Piano Lesson, and Flash in Naples — Basquiat works through this mythology with the attention of someone who grew up inside it and understood its exclusions from the inside. The figures are recognisable enough to activate their associations and distorted enough to make those associations visible as constructions. VENUS MADONNA© and SATURDAY MORNING CARTOON© sit alongside SUGAR COATED CORN PUFFS©TM — the iconography of hope and the iconography of breakfast cereal given the same trademark treatment, the difference between them exposed as smaller than the mythology would suggest. The repeated laughter that runs through the portfolio — HA HEE HO scattered across the images — is not celebratory. It is the sound of someone watching a magic trick from close enough to see the mechanism.

Basquiat grew up reading these comics in Brooklyn in the 1960s and 70s, at a moment when the characters who looked like him were almost entirely absent from the heroic roles. What the Superhero Portfolio ultimately asks is what the American dream looks like when you approach it from the wrong side of its promises — and whether the figures tasked with delivering justice were ever designed to deliver it to everyone.

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