6.99

This painting throws a wall of color and scribbles at you, with a big red price tag reading "6.99" pinned to the top right like it was ripped from a supermarket ad. Basquiat loved mixing street signs, prices, and copyright symbols into his work, and here he turns a cheap grocery number into something loud and strange. Look for the two figures that anchor the chaos: a nude standing man in the middle, painted in sickly greens and yellows, and off to the right, one of Basquiat's signature skull-like heads with gritted teeth and wild eyes.

Basquiat started out spray-painting poetry on New York walls in the late 1970s under the tag SAMO, then exploded onto the gallery scene as one of the young stars of the 1980s Neo-Expressionist movement. His paintings often feel unfinished on purpose, full of crossed-out words, crowns, and hasty marks, because he wanted the raw energy of the street to stay in them. The "5599" scrawled in the bottom corner and the copyright "S" up top show how obsessed he was with logos and money, subjects that hit differently coming from an artist who died at just 27 and whose work now sells for tens of millions.