Portfolio II by Jean-Michel Basquiat brings together four screenprints — Charles the First, Cabeza, Rome Pays Off, and Jawbone of an Ass — each one approaching the same set of questions from a different angle: who holds power, how it is named and branded, what history it rests on, and what happens when you look at it directly.

The four works were made in 1982 and 1983, at the height of what was arguably the most intellectually dense period of Basquiat's career. He was reading Roman history, the Bible, Caribbean colonial economics, Egyptology, and the history of jazz simultaneously, and the paintings he made that year absorbed all of it without separating it into categories. Charles the First and Rome Pays Off are both about the relationship between authority and money — the crown above MOST KINGS GET THEIR HEAD CUT OFF answering the crossed-out MARKET VALUE© as two versions of the same observation about what power actually is and how it ends. Cabeza reduces that argument to a single watching face on a yellow ground. Jawbone of an Ass reaches back to the Book of Judges — Samson killing a thousand Philistines with the jaw of a donkey — and finds in that improvised, unlikely act of resistance an image that speaks directly to Basquiat's own position as a young Black artist dismantling the mythologies of a culture that had not been designed to include him.

What the portfolio demonstrates is how completely these sources were integrated in his thinking rather than held apart. History, scripture, economics, and personal experience were all drawing on the same set of questions, and Basquiat moved between them with the fluency of someone for whom the connections were obvious. By 1983 the institutions celebrating his work were among the same ones his imagery was examining — and Portfolio II holds that tension across four prints without releasing it.

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