Basquiat: Headstrong

Author: Anders Kold, Kaspar Thormod, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Poul Erik Tøjner, Hilton Als

Format: Hardcover | 132 pages

Dimensions: 22.91 × 1.70 × 32.99 cm

Publication date: May 19, 2026

Treating the head as a subject of exploration, Basquiat's energetic drawings of faces feel both spontaneous and deeply reflective

From 1981 to 1983, Jean-Michel Basquiat produced somewhere between 50 and 100 drawings of heads. Made with oil stick on paper, the series stands apart from his well-known paintings and collages crowded with text and symbols. It is a more focused, personal exploration, and its works are rarely shown and seldom come up for sale. Free of outside references, the drawings come across as intimate reflections on identity, perception, and the delicate tension between being present and fading away.

Uniting this remarkable body of work for the first time in decades in a large-format folio, Headstrong offers fresh insight into a less familiar side of Basquiat's art. Essays by Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Hilton Als and artists such as George Condo and Julie Mehretu examine the drawings' formal inventiveness and emotional force, revealing how Basquiat turned the head into a container for all his thoughts and feelings, a place where imagination, history, and personal experience meet.

Although his career was short, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88) remains one of the most successful Black visual artists of all time. He burst onto the New York art scene in the late 1970s and rapidly rose to global acclaim, becoming one of the defining artists of his generation. His work and legacy still shape popular culture today, particularly in art, music, and fashion.