Basquiat’s Crown Returns: The King Still Speaks
The Basquiat estate releases a new limited-edition print, “King Alphonso,” exploring race, power, and legacy through the artist’s iconic crown.
The Basquiat estate is letting a ghost speak again. “King Alphonso,” a 1982–83 drawing once pulsing from Jean-Michel Basquiat’s hand, is reborn as a limited print — sixty copies only, released through Pace Prints this November. The paper breathes white around a black crown and a head beneath it. Sparse, raw, alive.
The work digs at colonial myth. Alphonso XIII of Spain — “El Africano” — a monarch who once embodied empire’s arrogance, becomes Basquiat’s mirror. The artist places his crown on that king, not as tribute, but takeover. Power reimagined, history inverted.
Basquiat’s crown was never decoration. It was a claim — three peaks for the poet, the musician, the fighter. Each one carved into the face of modern art like a warning and a prayer.
His sisters, Lisane Basquiat and Jeanine Heriveaux, will stamp and sign each print. The same hands that guarded his legacy now extend it. Just days ago, the block where Basquiat lived — Great Jones Street — was renamed “Jean-Michel Basquiat Way.”
The king may be gone, but the crown refuses to rest.
© ART Walkway 2025. All Rights Reserved.
