Notary

Two skull-like figures dominate this sprawling 1983 canvas, painted when Jean-Michel Basquiat was only about twenty-two and already a rising star in New York's downtown art scene. The words that crowd the surface tell you as much as the images do. "This note for all debts public and private" comes straight off American paper money, while scattered terms like "Pluto," "salt," "parasites," and "leeches" pile up like a strange coded list. Basquiat loved doing this, mixing anatomy, money, science, and street language into something that reads like a page torn from a restless mind.

Basquiat started out writing graffiti under the tag SAMO before moving to canvas, and that raw, scrawled energy never left his work. Look for the crossed-out words here, because he often struck through text on purpose. He once said that crossing out a word made you notice it more, so nothing is really an accident even when it looks messy. The two figures, with their bared teeth and exposed bones, connect to his ongoing interest in the human body and in Black identity, drawn with the same urgent lines he used across his short career.

Painted at the height of the 1980s Neo-Expressionist movement, "Notary" shows why collectors and fellow artists took Basquiat so seriously so fast. He died in 1988 at just twenty-seven, leaving behind a body of work that still feels loud, personal, and alive.