Jean-Michel Basquiat Portfolio I Series For Sale

Portfolio I brings together four of Jean-Michel Basquiat's most recognisable images and motifs in a single posthumous print series: the crowned figure of Per Capita, the soap-advertisement grid of Rinso, the searching, x-rayed body of Ernok, and the stark skull imagery of Untitled (Head). All four draw on paintings Basquiat made in 1983, one of the defining years of his career, though the prints themselves weren't published until his estate issued them in 2001, four years after his death, giving collectors access to some of his most iconic visual language in an editioned form rarely available outside major auctions and museum holdings.

Per Capita takes its imagery from Basquiat's own 1981 painting of the same name, built around one of his most recurring symbols: a three-pointed crown, placed here directly above the word "Asbestos." Basquiat used the crown throughout his career to elevate figures he admired, often Black athletes and artists overlooked or undervalued by the wider art world, effectively crowning them as royalty and placing himself among their ranks. Positioned over a word tied to industrial harm and hidden cost, the crown in Per Capita reads as something closer to a claim about survival and worth measured against a system built to extract value from people rather than honour them. Rinso takes on that same territory from a different angle, borrowing its structure from a real historical soap advertisement, stamping "SLOGAN" across the composition alongside a copyright symbol, its gridded layout reading simultaneously as stacked bars of soap and rows of bricks, a pointed confrontation with how racist caricature and commercial advertising moved together through American consumer culture. Ernok and Untitled (Head) round out the set, the latter returning to the skull and skeletal imagery that had already become one of Basquiat's defining subjects by this point in his career.

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