Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1982

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s All Colored Cast (Part III), created in 1982, is a large-scale work executed in acrylic and crayon on a square canvas measuring 152.5 by 152.5 centimeters. Currently held in a private collection, the painting immediately commands attention through its vivid yellow background, which serves as a luminous field upon which a dense accumulation of graffiti-like text, symbols, numerals, and a central figurative image compete for the viewer’s eye. The composition is simultaneously energetic and deliberate — chaotic in appearance yet structured in its layering of detail. Taken together, the elements of the painting form a richly loaded visual inventory, weaving language, history, the human body, and economic life into a single charged surface.

The linguistic dimension of All Colored Cast (Part III) is immediately striking. Basquiat covers the canvas in graffiti-style, all-caps lettering, treating words as visual objects as much as legible text. Words and numerals are inscribed across the yellow background in a seemingly haphazard manner, generating a sense of restless raw energy. Among the words visible on the canvas are “DRACHM,” “PHLEGM,” and “THUMB” — terms that span the ancient world of currency, the vocabulary of bodily humors, and the physical human form. The crown motif, one of the painting’s most prominent symbols, appears above the word “PAW,” functioning almost as a form of punctuation or royal emphasis. Certain words and phrases throughout the composition appear crossed out, a deliberate visual gesture that simultaneously calls attention to and enacts the erasure of language.

The painting also inscribes history directly onto its surface through the names of real figures and places. The phrase “Alexander the Great” appears on the canvas, conjuring the ancient Macedonian conqueror and evoking the long reach of empire and the Western historical canon. Beside this stands the name “Jersey Joe Walcott,” the Black American world heavyweight boxing champion whose career represented both athletic excellence and the fraught terrain of race in mid-twentieth-century America. Further grounding the work in a global historical consciousness are geographic references to “Haiti” and “China” — two nations whose histories are deeply marked by colonialism, resistance, and political transformation. Together, these inscribed names and places situate the painting within a broad and layered understanding of world history.

Alongside its textual and historical elements, the painting presents a sustained engagement with the human body. At the center of the composition stands a figure rendered in black, with stark white highlights delineating skeletal features beneath the surface of the skin. The figure is depicted simultaneously from the outside — as a recognizable human silhouette — and from within, as the underlying skeleton asserts itself through the painterly surface. This tension between exterior and interior is made explicit through anatomical labels affixed to the figure, with indicators pointing to “chest,” “liver,” and “lungs.” These labels treat the body as a diagram, a specimen to be catalogued and examined, lending the central figure both a clinical and a deeply human quality.

Finally, the painting engages the language of business and economics with equal directness. The letter sequence “FKGD” appears on the canvas — the ticker symbol of Cairn Energy PLC, a company that went public in 1980, just two years before the painting was made. Its presence on the canvas introduces the world of financial markets and corporate enterprise into the composition. Numerals and numbers are scattered across the surface, evoking the visual language of ledgers, tallies, and pricing. Taken as a whole, All Colored Cast (Part III) is a painting that refuses simplicity. Its yellow field holds language, history, anatomy, and commerce in a state of urgent, unresolved coexistence — a visual world as dense and contradictory as the one it reflects.