In 1983, Robert Farris Thompson published Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy, a landmark study of the visual and spiritual cultures of the African diaspora that traced living continuities between the arts of West and Central Africa and those of the Black Atlantic world. Basquiat encountered the book the year it appeared and began making references to it almost immediately in his work. By 1985 he was eager enough to meet its author that he sought Thompson out — and when the Yale art historian arrived at the studio, Basquiat gave him Untitled on the spot.¹

The work he chose to give was, in its structure, something like a book. Nine Xeroxed pages are adhered to the canvas, their arrangement forming a constellation — surrounded by white paint and enclosed by a border of roughly applied cerulean blue. Each page contains figures, lists, and illustrations drawn from Basquiat's expansive visual lexicon: two musicians at their instruments, a figure resting his chin on his hand, a penny, a set of machine commands ("POWER," "RIBBON RELEASE," "FEED:EJECT") each paired with a small illustration. The pages can be read individually or as a continuous whole; they are, as the work insists in its very structure, simultaneously separate and intertwined.

The list of names is the work's most pointed element. Basquiat catalogues them as film and radio "co-stars": Louise Brooks, Ethel Waters, Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, Lena Horne. Each figure made their career in an industry that simultaneously needed and constrained them — Brooks the iconoclast who fled Hollywood for Berlin, Waters the first Black Emmy nominee, Anderson the comedian whose apparent subservience to Jack Benny was always denser and more subversive than it appeared, Horne the activist who refused demeaning roles and paid for it professionally. To call them "co-stars" is to position them against something, some primary structure they were always adjacent to. Basquiat calls them by name — pulls them from that adjacency and places them at the center of the frame.

The technology references carry a different temperature: cooler, more clinical, the language of a machine that doesn't know it's being watched. "RIBBON RELEASE," "FEED:EJECT" — commands from a typewriter or early word processor, the apparatus through which language is produced and distributed. In 1985, these carried a specific historical charge, the emerging grammar of a new information economy. Basquiat places them alongside musicians and performers and pennies and faces without resolving the tension, allowing the juxtapositions to remain active and unreconciled.

The work is thought to be a study for Zydeco, a larger triptych whose name — that distinctly Creole music born from the crossings Thompson had spent his career studying — suggests the depth of the intellectual resonance between the two men. That resonance would become a lasting friendship rooted, as Thompson described it, in genuine exchange. His account of Basquiat's practice provides as precise a description of this work as any: "There was a kind of deliberate roughness to his paintings, as if to say: I remain a warrior of the streets; behold the world as seen through vernacular eyes."²

Notes
¹ The circumstances of the gift are documented through Robert Farris Thompson's account of his first meeting with the artist at Basquiat's studio.
² Robert Farris Thompson, "Three Works by Basquiat," in Basquiat and the Bayou, exh. cat., Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, 2014–2015, pp. 31–32.