Basquiat's Untitled (Skull), 1981: What the Skull Head Shows and Means

Stand in front of the 1981 canvas and the head fills almost all of it. The Broad describes exposed jaw and teeth, sunken eyes, loose lines, vivid colors and layered marks, so that the face seems to be built and taken apart at the same time. It is not a clean, bare skull. There are eyes and hair as well as teeth and jaw, which is why people looking at it often say it feels like a living face and a skull at once. The Broad's phrase for this is a head that exists between life and death.

The museum's title is simply *Untitled*. "Skull" is the name the painting picked up along the way, and it is the name you will see on posters and in conversation. According to the museum's Basquiat guide, the painting was shown in Basquiat's first solo gallery exhibition in New York. Our famous skull art story gives the short version of this painting among other skull works; here is the longer one.

Basquiat's interest in the inside of the body has a story attached to it. The Estate's chronology, as reported by The History of Art, records that after a car accident and a stay in hospital in 1969, his mother gave him a copy of *Gray's Anatomy*, the medical textbook of the human body.

That gift helps explain his later interest in anatomical imagery. It does not mean the 1981 head copies any particular page. The painted skull has no matching plate or model named by The Broad or in the Estate-linked account. If you want to compare his head with the real structure underneath a face, our story on human skull facts walks through the bones.

The skull head did not arrive alone. The National Gallery of Victoria records that in 1981 Basquiat began filling his paintings and drawings with oversized heads. The Broad's canvas is one of the most famous of them, but it belongs to a whole run of faces that year.

Curator and art historian Fred Hoffman reads these heads as places where outer appearance meets inner processes: seeing, hearing, smelling and knowing. Read that way, the 1981 painting opens up. The open jaw, the hollow eyes and the marks scrawled across the skull look less like a portrait of what someone looks like and more like a portrait of what is going on inside a head.

If the heads are one of Basquiat's signatures, the three-pointed crown is the other. Curator Megan Kincaid and director Franklin Sirmans of the Pérez Art Museum Miami describe the crown as a recurring symbol across his paintings, drawings and prints. They connect it with recognition, excellence, leadership and resilience, and with the difficulties that come with success. Basquiat crowned Black artists, musicians, athletes, writers and historical figures.

Curator Dieter Buchhart, quoted by The New York Times in an article reproduced by Nahmad Contemporary, puts it more loosely: ten people may give the crown ten different meanings. He ties it to Basquiat's phrase "royalty, heroism and the streets" and to the way he used crowns to mark the figures and subjects he thought mattered. A crowned skull has a story of its own, told in skull with crown meaning.

Basquiat did not leave one explanation of the 1981 head, so its meaning comes from the people who have spent years with his work. Their readings overlap without being the same, and they are worth hearing one at a time.

The Broad presents the head as a possible self-portrait suspended between life and death, with a subdued face and intense inner energy. The museum also links it to African mask forms, to identity and to the pressure of sudden commercial success.

Fred Hoffman, as above, sees his heads as the meeting point of visible identity and inner mental life. Writing about the crown, the critic Thomas McEvilley described it as "a royal selfhood somehow lost but dimly remembered, overlaid by a voodoo mask," as the Los Angeles Times reported in 1993.

The same article gives the reading of bell hooks, who wrote her name in lowercase. She read the crown as a critique of Basquiat's own desire for fame, and the skeletal quality of some of his Black figures as a sign of the violent erasure of Black people, their culture and their traditions. That reading turns the skull from a private self-portrait into a statement about history, and it sits beside The Broad's reading rather than replacing it.

For the wider range of things a skull can stand for, from mortality to warning, our page on skull symbolism covers the ground.

The record-breaking Basquiat is the 1982 *Untitled*, not The Broad's painting. Sotheby's sold it in New York on May 18, 2017, to Yusaku Maezawa for $110.5 million. Sotheby's described the result as the highest auction price for an American artist at that time, and said the painting led a $319 million Contemporary Art Evening Sale. Before the sale, Sotheby's records, the 1982 painting was on display at the Barbican in London in 2017.

So, if a headline about the $110.5 million skull brought you here, it was talking about the 1982 head. The 1981 head stays in The Broad's collection in Los Angeles. Skulls and very large sums have met before: Damien Hirst's diamond-covered cast is told in Hirst's diamond skull.

The 1981 head is in The Broad's collection at 221 S. Grand Avenue in Los Angeles. Not every work in a collection is on the wall every day, so confirm with The Broad that the painting is on view before you plan a trip around it.

If you want to see more of his work, the Basquiat Estate lists public collections that hold it, among them the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, The Menil Collection in Houston, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met has its own *Untitled* of 1981, a third work again and not the skull at The Broad, and its collection record currently marks it not on view.

These are the questions that come up most about the painting.

Basquiat's heads make more sense beside the other painters who put skulls at the center of their work, from Holbein to Hirst, in famous skull art. His New York contemporary Andy Warhol made his own run of skull paintings in 1976, told in Warhol's skull paintings.

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