polity united states reagan eraconcept:era contemporary
Dustheads
Acrylic, oil stick, and metallic paint on canvas by Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1982. Two abstracted, contorted heads rendered in vivid color with metallic highlights. The title references 'dust,' street slang for PCP (phencyclidine), connecting the distorted imagery to drug-altered perception and the downtown New York street culture Basquiat inhabited. Sold at Christie's New York on 9 May 2013 for $48,800,000.
Scholarly Significance
Anchor the Basquiat canonical cluster with Dustheads (1982) — a peak-year diptych-format canvas referencing PCP drug culture. Christie's 2013 sale at $48.8M was a major posthumous market milestone predating the 2017 records.
Notes
- ·Painted in 1982 at the height of Basquiat's creative output and critical ascent.
- ·The title is a direct reference to PCP ('dust'), situating the work within the drug culture of the Lower East Side and downtown New York scene that Basquiat navigated — as observer, participant, and ultimately victim.
- ·The two-head composition reflects Basquiat's recurring interest in duality, dialogue, and paired figures, which appears across his work in various forms.
- ·The metallic paint adds a material excess to the surface that underscores the hallucinatory quality of the imagery.
- ·The 2013 Christie's sale at $48.8M was a landmark result at the time, occurring four years before the 2017 records would more than double it.
- ·Often paired in scholarly discussion with other 1982 works — the Skull series, the boxer paintings — as evidence of an extraordinary concentrated peak in Basquiat's production.