Jean-Michel Basquiat’s King Alphonso stages a declaration of sovereignty in his unmistakable visual language. A jagged, black three-point crown hovers above a mask-like head rendered in urgent reds, cobalt, and inky blacks. The face—a fusion of skull, helmet, and machine—bristles with grids, vents, and tube-like forms, as if wired for breath and thought. Around it, blue schematic lines, ticks, and radiating “sun” symbols map a field of energy, recalling street diagrams, circuitry, and astronomical charts at once. Basquiat’s hand-scrawled title, KING ALPHONSO, anchors the composition with the raw authority of graffiti, while the gold teeth and slit eyes sharpen the figure’s feral charisma.

Here the artist’s signature crown anoints a new monarch—one of Basquiat’s recurring exaltations of Black heroes and self-made royalty. The picture balances childlike immediacy with complex notation: language becomes drawing, drawing becomes code. Abrasion, drips, and pentimenti keep the surface alive, emphasizing process over polish. King Alphonso condenses Basquiat’s major themes—power, identity, and the poetics of street mark-making—into a taut emblem: a crowned head pulsing at the center of an improvised cosmos. It reads like a proclamation scrawled on the city’s skin—at once personal, mythic, and defiantly modern.