By 1987, Jean-Michel Basquiat had traveled further from his beginnings than almost any artist of his generation — and The Whole Livery Line charts the distance while refusing to abandon the origin. The phrase and the poem it opens first appeared as street poetry, spray-painted on a wall in downtown New York and memorialized in Downtown 81, the film shot across 1980 and 1981 that captured Basquiat moving through the city before the galleries found him.

The complete text reads: The whole livery line / bow like this with / the big money all / crushed into these feet. Livery carries its full range of meanings simultaneously — the uniformed servant, the hired horse, the labor that moves wealth without sharing in it — and the poem enacts what it describes. The figure bowing holds the posture of deference while the big money, rather than rising to the top, is crushed downward, compressed into the feet, the lowest point of the body and the site of the most physical labor. It is a poem about economic gravity: the way capital presses down through every tier of a system until it lands, with full force, on those at the bottom.

The work belongs to a suite of three large-scale text paintings from that year, all reaching back to the spontaneous street poetry Basquiat had once applied directly to buildings. A clear influence throughout is Cy Twombly — one of his acknowledged heroes, whose practice of merging poetry and painting into a single visual field he deeply admired, and to whom he paid explicit tribute with the abbreviation "TWOM" inscribed in the related Pay for Soup. Like Twombly, Basquiat understood that handwriting carries the body into the image: a line of text on a large canvas is never only legible, but always also physical, a gesture as much as a statement.

The Whole Livery Line is that understanding at its most complete — language that began on a wall, survived on film, and returned, a decade later, as one of his last major works, carrying everything the intervening years had taught him about what those words meant.