The Whole Livery Line signed, titled and dated '"THE WHOLE LIVERY LINE" Jean-Michel Basquiat 87' (on the reverse) acrylic, oil and oilstick on canvas 49½ x 39½ in. (125.6 x 100.3 cm.) Executed in 1987. Pay For Soup signed, titled and dated 'Jean-Michel Basquiat "PAY FOR SOUP" 87' (on the reverse) acrylic, oil and oilstick on canvas 49½ x 39½ in. (125.6 x 100.3 cm.) Executed in 1987. Universal signed, titled and dated 'Jean-Michel Basquiat 'Universal' 87' (on the reverse) acrylic, oil and oilstick on canvas 49½ x 39½ in. (125.6 x 100.3 cm.) Executed in 1987.

Image courtesy of the artist.

A suite of three Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings from 1987, these paintings evoke Basquiat's "graffiti" roots when the artist was first living in New York and spray-painting spontaneous "street poetry" on buildings. Basquiat combines texts--equally humorous and cryptic and rendered in the artist's raw, yet poignant handwriting--with a few scattered scattered images. As is evidenced by the abbreviated "TWOM" in Pay for Soup, a clear influence is Cy Twombly, one of the artist's heroes, whose work has long merged poetry with painting. Like Twombly, Basquiat elevated small details--a diamond shape, a universal logo, scrawled text--by realizing them on a large-scale and thereby turning them into grander statements about culture and society.