Executed in 1982, 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Derelict' is one of the most striking and sophisticated paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s career. In the same private collection for nearly thirty years, this magisterial triptych is comprised of ten painted wooden panels, each showing the signs, cyphers and complex graphic language that comprises the artist’s unique iconography; the legendary curator Klaus Kertess called this painting a “complex and ambitious attempt by the artist to devise a new form of artistic language for himself, for painting, and for Black culture” (K. Kertess, “Brushes with Beatitude,” in R. Marshall, Jean-Michel Basquiat, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1992, p. 50). It’s highly sophisticated and personal imagery reveals an artist steeped in the art historical traditions of painting, yet at the same time struggling to reconcile his own role within the contemporary artistic canon. Distinctly reverential, yet at the same time, bitingly provocative, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Derelict has been widely exhibited, including in the artist’s now legendary show at New York’s FUN Gallery in 1982 and more recently in the celebrated 2019 retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. Thus, it is regarded as one of the highpoints of Basquiat’s career, an astute distillation of the ideas that have made him one of the most celebrated and important artistic voices of the late twentieth century.
Measuring over six feet square, this monumental painting is an artistic tour-de-force. Using found pieces of wood, metal plates, and pieces of hardware (hooks, bolts, fastenings etc.), Basquiat constructs a visual biography of the artist and his world. The central panel bares a erudite display of some of the artist’s most iconic and important motifs. Located firmly in the center of this tall panel, and therefore in the center of the composition, is the artist’s signature three pointed crown. The most important of all of Basquiat’s symbolic associations, this simple moniker has become a signature of sorts, a visual representation of the artist that appears in many of his most important works. In addition to its prime position, the rendering of this crown could be read as a not-so-subtle comment on Basquiat’s ascendancy as black teenager into a white-dominated art world. On a foundational layer of black paint, adorned by Pollock-like drips of white, Basquiat’s crown emerges out of a tumultuous swirl of gray paint—a combination of black and white pigment—proudly occupying the center of the composition.
