Jean-Michel Basquiat, Elaine (1985) A single portrait, surrounded by more than a dozen sheets torn from Basquiat's own notebooks — photocopied and fixed straight to the canvas. The result is dense, encyclopedic: nearly every square inch carries his vocabulary. At the center, Elaine's face is layered from multiple dark pigments to catch the subtleties of skin, her lipstick and eyeshadow struck fast in oilstick. Around her, the recurring signs — a foot, a skull with its brain exposed, monkeys and bears — sit beside lists of grains and the industrial names of an American century: Westinghouse, Packard, Hudson, Ford. As Richard Marshall observed, Basquiat "continually selected and injected into his works words which held charged references" — to race, human rights, and the making of power and wealth. #Basquiat #JeanMichelBasquiat #GuyHepner #ContemporaryArt