Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Jawbone Of An Ass, from Portfolio II, is a dense and confrontational composition that fuses historical reference, language, and symbolic violence into a charged visual field. The work unfolds across a wide horizontal format, divided into blocks of text, imagery, and gestural marks that read like fragments torn from an ancient manuscript, courtroom record, and street wall simultaneously.

At the center, a tall column of handwritten names and phrases—many referencing classical history, biblical figures, and sites of empire—asserts Basquiat’s ongoing interrogation of how power is recorded and remembered. The title alludes to the biblical story of Samson, who used the jawbone of an ass as a weapon, a metaphor that resonates with Basquiat’s recurring interest in improvised tools, brute force, and symbolic resistance. Language itself becomes a weapon here: listed, stacked, and relentlessly accumulated.

Surrounding this textual core are sketch-like figures, crowned motifs, and aggressively worked passages of color—ochre, black, white, green, and red—interrupted by erasures and crossings-out. These visual interruptions signal censorship, revision, and the instability of historical narratives. Basquiat’s line oscillates between childlike immediacy and sharp precision, reinforcing the tension between innocence and brutality.

The composition resists a single point of focus, forcing the viewer to move laterally across the surface, absorbing history as a fractured, contested space rather than a coherent story. In its screen-printed form, Jawbone Of An Ass retains the urgency and intellectual weight of Basquiat’s original mark-making while amplifying its graphic impact. The result is a powerful meditation on history, violence, and the enduring struggle over who controls language—and how it is used. For more information on