King Alphonso by Jean-Michel Basquiat centres on the crown — the single motif more associated with Basquiat than any other, appearing across paintings, drawings, and prints from his earliest years through to his death in 1988, and now inseparable from his place in the culture. Here it is drawn in four bold strokes, monumental against a bare ground, positioned above a red head packed with circuitry, yellow eyes, gold teeth, and mechanical notation, blue diagrammatic lines radiating outward across the pale surface.

Basquiat used the crown as a mark of self-coronation — a symbol claimed rather than conferred, extending recognition to figures outside the structures that traditionally awarded it: Black artists, jazz musicians, athletes, the overlooked and the erased. The title invokes a lineage of European kings while the image underneath shows a figure that has been opened, examined, and partly mechanised. The disproportion between the two — the enormous simplicity of the crown, the dense complexity of what it sits above — is the work's argument. Authority is asserted through symbol while the thing it governs is shown to be fragile, constructed, and fully exposed.

Basquiat grew up in Brooklyn, the son of a Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother, and his engagement with power was never abstract. The crown was an anti-colonial gesture as much as a personal one — a refusal of the hierarchies that determined whose image, whose history, and whose name got to matter. King Alphonso distils that argument to its most economical form: a symbol of authority so large it dwarfs everything beneath it, and a figure beneath it that has already been taken apart.

For more information or to buy King Alphonso by Jean-Michel Basquiat, contact our specialists using the enquiry button above.