Jean-Michel Basquiat Singles

These prints don't belong to any single named portfolio. Instead, this selection brings together individual, highly collectable images the estate has released on their own terms over the years, each pulled from a different point in Basquiat's short but extraordinarily dense working life. Flexible, released in 2016, is based on a 1984 panel painting made from deconstructed fence timber at his studio in Venice, California, depicting a griot, the storyteller and keeper of oral history in West African tradition, a subject that let Basquiat work through questions of history, memory and the artist's own role as a kind of modern griot himself. The original painting sold at auction for $45.3 million in 2018, one of the clearest markers of how far his reputation has travelled since his death.

King Alphonso, released more recently in 2025, takes on a different kind of history entirely, referencing Alfonso XIII, the last ruling monarch of Spain, whose colonial-era views earned him the nickname "El Africano." Basquiat sets his own three-pointed crown directly above the king's head, a gesture the artist Francesco Clemente, a close friend, once explained in terms specific to Basquiat's own iconography: "Jean-Michel's crown has three peaks, for his three royal lineages: the poet, the musician, the great boxing champion." Placing that crown over a controversial European monarch rather than one of his usual subjects, Black athletes, musicians, artists, gives the piece a sharper, more pointed edge than most of his royal imagery.

Hollywood Africans, Odours of Punt and Phooey round out the group, each pulled from a different year and a different corner of Basquiat's practice, together giving collectors access to individual, standout images that were never intended to sit inside a wider series in the first place.

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