One of the most direct statements Jean-Michel Basquiat made about power, Charles the First, from Portfolio II is structured across three vertical panels — pale yellow, blue, and deep navy — each one a separate field of text, symbol, and figure. The left panel carries a crown above THOR, the Superman S, and at the base the declaration "MOST KINGS GET THEIR HEAD CUT OFF" with YOUNG crossed through. The centre is dominated by a heavily scrawled copyright symbol, COPYRIGHT partially legible beneath the marks, alongside "4 FEET HANDS" and "CUT OFF." The right panel moves through OPERA, HOMEPLACE, and CHEROKEE boxed as though catalogued, a crown in blue chalk, and a MARVEL COMICS copyright tag at the base.

The title invokes Charles I of England, executed in 1649, but Basquiat is not making a history painting. The crossed-out words, the copyright marks, the mythological and Indigenous names sitting alongside corporate intellectual property — these are all part of the same argument: that ownership of language, image, and narrative is itself a form of power, and that power is always provisional. THOR and CHEROKEE and MARVEL COMICS in the same frame is not accidental. It is a precise account of how culture is claimed, branded, and controlled.

Basquiat had been making this argument since his years as SAMO, tagging the walls of SoHo and the Lower East Side with aphorisms that targeted the art world's own systems of value and exclusion. By 1982 he was inside those systems — and the tension between that position and his critique of it runs through everything he made. When his Estate issued this screenprint in 2004, sixteen years after his death at twenty-seven, the institutions and market structures he had spent his career anatomising were the same ones now controlling the circulation of his work — an irony the imagery of Charles the First makes difficult to ignore.

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