Per Capita, from Portfolio I by Jean-Michel Basquiat is built around a single emblem — a blue crown over a saturated red ground, framed like a flag or coat of arms, with ASBESTOS written beneath it in the same blue and the same scale. The two words share a colour and a register, as though they belong to the same category of thing. Around this central image, the surrounding areas are filled with collaged fragments, mythological notation, and schematic figures — gods from Egyptian, Greek, and Islamic traditions alongside anatomical references and numerical data, none resolved, all orbiting the central pairing.

The crown appears throughout Basquiat's output as an act of self-coronation — a symbol claimed outside the structures that traditionally confer it, used to elevate Black artists, jazz musicians, and athletes who had been written out of the official record. In Per Capita it operates differently. Here the crown is placed not above a figure but above ASBESTOS, and the effect is to ask what authority actually delivers to those beneath it — not recognition, not protection, but contamination. The crown confers; the toxin accumulates. Per capita is the unit through which economists measure the distribution of wealth across a population — per head, divided evenly on paper — and Basquiat's image shows precisely what that division looks like in practice.

That Basquiat could compress an argument of this complexity into something this visually immediate is inseparable from his formation — growing up in Brooklyn between communities that understood the distance between the language of equal distribution and the reality of where harm actually lands, and arriving at the centre of the art world with that understanding completely intact.

For more information or to buy Per Capita, from Portfolio I by Jean-Michel Basquiat, contact our specialists using the enquiry button above.