Piano Lesson, from the Superhero Portfolio by Jean-Michel Basquiat places two figures in uneasy proximity — on the left a dense, totemic form combining a Batman mask, grid-patterned torso, bat symbol, and layered text; on the right a simplified Robin-like figure in red, marked with TWO WAY WRIST RADIO boxed at the wrist. Between them, two hands: RH numbered across the fingers on the left, LH marked FLEXI DIGITI in the centre, the whole arrangement recalling the hand diagrams of a beginner's piano primer. POOEY appears in a speech bubble at the lower left.

The piano reference is not incidental. Music ran through Basquiat's work as a structural as much as a biographical preoccupation — Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis appear by name across his paintings, and the bebop tradition informed how he thought about improvisation, speed, and the relationship between structure and rupture. The hands in Piano Lesson are labeled with the precision of a practice exercise, but the lesson they belong to has been overtaken by superhero iconography and anatomical hybrid language — the fingers that should be learning scales are instead FLEXI DIGITI, the wrist that should be relaxed carries a two-way radio. Instruction has been absorbed and immediately disrupted.

Basquiat grew up in Brooklyn but the music of Harlem — the clubs, the records, the lineage from bebop through to the downtown No Wave scene he came up in — shaped his understanding of what it meant to work fast, to layer, to leave the process visible. Jazz never resolved; it accumulated and transformed, and Piano Lesson operates by the same logic, the superhero figures as provisional and unfinished as a chord that refuses to land. The Superhero Portfolio was issued posthumously in 2022 by his Estate and published by Pace Prints in an edition of 85.

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