Jean-Michel Basquiat’s MCVIIV9 (1981), executed in oilstick on paper, is a striking example of the artist’s raw and immediate visual language during a pivotal moment in his career. By 1981, Basquiat was moving from his SAMO graffiti identity into the gallery system, and his works on paper from this period function like visual notebooks—fragments of thought, urban observations, and coded histories.

At the center of the composition, a simplified blue automobile is rendered with a childlike but forceful energy. Cars were a recurring motif in Basquiat’s early works, emblematic of speed, modernity, and consumer culture, but they also carried associations of accidents, destruction, and mortality—subjects that haunted his art throughout his career. To the right of the car appear two crude crowns, one of Basquiat’s most enduring symbols. The crown served as an assertion of status and power, simultaneously self-mythologizing and elevating his subjects, particularly figures of Black excellence who had historically been excluded from the canon of Western art.

Beneath the car, the lower section of the composition introduces a boxed numerical grid filled with numbers arranged in compartments. This recalls the appearance of board games, calendars, or architectural diagrams. Basquiat often employed numerical systems to evoke coded structures of knowledge, challenging how such systems were used to organize, categorize, and contain meaning. Alongside this is the inscription “MCVII V9,” where the Roman numeral “MCVII” translates to 1107. Basquiat frequently inserted Roman numerals into his works as both a visual device and as a reference to the authority of Western historical traditions. By embedding these systems of notation into his compositions, he questioned their permanence and exclusivity, suggesting that history and knowledge were never neutral but always shaped by power.

Scattered across the page are letters, repeated windows, and fragmented shapes that evoke the cityscape of New York. These fractured symbols conjure a sense of noise and density, much like the urban environment that inspired Basquiat’s practice. The cryptic inscription “N+OA” in red exemplifies his playful and fragmented use of language. Rather than presenting clear messages, Basquiat fractured words and letters into visual poetry, resisting linear meaning and instead encouraging multiple interpretations. The heavy black marks to the right of the grid resemble trees, totems, or obscured forms. These gestures of erasure and concealment were central to Basquiat’s approach, as he constantly played with presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, legibility and obscurity.

The work encapsulates Basquiat’s broader concerns at the beginning of the 1980s. The automobile and city motifs evoke the chaos and energy of New York, the crowns assert power and respect, the grids and Roman numerals question the structures of knowledge and history, while the blackened forms suggest vulnerability and erasure. Rather than functioning as isolated images, these symbols create a network of layered meanings that echo Basquiat’s restless, inquisitive, and uncompromising artistic vision.

As an early work on paper, MCVII V9 is significant not only for its energetic draftsmanship but also for the way it condenses many of the themes that would define Basquiat’s career. It reflects his ability to collapse high and low culture, history and contemporary life, into a single surface. The work demonstrates his talent for transforming raw, graffiti-inspired mark-making into a sophisticated visual language that interrogates identity, history, and mortality. In this way, the drawing stands as an important testament to Basquiat’s early maturity as an artist and to the urgency of his vision at the moment he was first being recognized by the art world.