A crown appears frequently in the early work of Jean-Michel Basquiat signaling his ambition and understanding of art history. Many artists used their monarchs to symbolize their own majestic powers and Basquiat, lacking one, continued the tradition in his own way. Besides, Basquiat was ambitious and out to become king of the pack. One friend who knew him early on wrote: “He could walk into a thrift store with five bucks and come out looking like a king. In fact he basically behaved like a king who had accidentally switched lives with an identical pauper.”1 Let’s take a look at Red Kings, painted in 1981 when he was twenty-one.
The apparent competition with Warhol and Picasso is not an exterior happening nor an account of their own places in history. Instead as in all art, the allusions are metaphorical. Basquiat's own mind has assimilated aspects of Warhol or Picasso through intimate knowledge of their work.3 Each of those heads is Basquiat. The Christ-figure, too, is not the historic Jesus but the divine spark in each of us which, if nurtured, will make us "Christ". Basquiat had no particular religion but the esoteric idea that we can each strive to become perfect, pure or wholly divine is such an important theme in poetic art and literature, regardless of which strain of the Inner Tradition is followed, that the sensitive Basquiat could not have missed it. And, once we attain perfection, we are re-born like Christ as an infant (metaphorically, of course.)
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