Woman with Roman Torso (Venus)

This 1982 canvas puts two very different figures side by side. On the left, a wild-haired woman emerges from a dark, scribbled mass, her body marked with cryptic symbols. On the right, a smooth yellow figure stands like a headless classical statue, the "Roman Torso" of the title. Between them, Basquiat scattered bananas, oranges, and a bunch of grapes, a still life plopped down in the middle of all the chaos. The clash between the raw, painted-over left half and the clean nude on the right is the whole point.

Jean-Michel Basquiat came out of the New York graffiti scene and became one of the most talked-about artists of the 1980s before his death at just 27. His paintings are full of numbers, half-erased words, and jittery lines that look like they were made fast, often because they were. Here he plays with the idea of Venus, the ancient goddess of beauty and love, by setting a tidy classical body against a messier, more human figure. The numbers like "1104" and rows of dollar signs floating in the yellow sky are typical Basquiat, personal codes that he never fully explained and probably never meant to.