Phooey by Jean-Michel Basquiat is one of his most expansive works — a robotic skeletal figure at the left, a mask-like face beside the notation HAS 49 CENTS, an orange fist dominating the upper centre, and to the right PETROLEUM © above SWALLOWS IODINE?, a crown outline, and at the base the deadpan account of a FAMOUS STRONGMAN who tore phone books while people stood on his chest. PESTUS X signs the lower right corner. The work accumulates rather than composes — each element given the same weight as the next, nothing elevated above anything else.

The specific content is characteristic of how Basquiat worked — commercial language, bodily notation, commodity references, and physical spectacle packed into the same image without hierarchy. PETROLEUM and PORK PRODUCT and JELLO sit alongside anatomical fragments and crown motifs, the whole work dense with competing registers that refuse to consolidate. Crossed-out words and collaged text inserts introduce a rhythm of assertion and erasure throughout, the same operation Basquiat had been performing since his SAMO years — drawing attention to what has been struck through as much as what remains legible.

Phooey was painted in 1982, at the height of Basquiat's most concentrated period of production. That year he showed at Documenta 7 in Kassel alongside Beuys and Rauschenberg, signed with Annina Nosei in New York, and was the subject of a cover story in the New York Times Magazine — all before his twenty-second birthday. He had moved from sleeping rough in cardboard boxes in Tompkins Square Park to the centre of the international art world in under three years, and was absorbing that ascent with the same speed and critical intelligence he brought to everything else. The density of Phooey is not incidental to that moment — it is a direct record of it.

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