Obnoxious Liberals by Jean-Michel Basquiat

Obnoxious Liberals by Jean-Michel Basquiat: introduction

Obnoxious Liberals brings three figures, several kinds of writing and a forceful contrast of red, blue, black and white onto a wide canvas. It was made in 1982, when Jean-Michel Basquiat was showing large paintings in New York and beyond. The words “OBNOXIOUS LIBERALS,” “SAMSON” and “NOT FOR SALE” are not labels that settle each figure's identity. They make viewers negotiate the relations among a bound body, a central figure marked by refusal and a smaller figure covered in signs of money. The result is politically charged without being a diagram with a single answer.^[1][2]

The Broad in Los Angeles holds the painting. Its collection record fixes the date, materials, size and accession number; the museum's Basquiat guide offers a much fuller visual and political interpretation. A published essay by Nathan Brown challenges one of that interpretation's central identifications. Reading them together reveals a productive question: who is refusing to be sold, and from what position within the scene? The painted words are visible, but the central figure's role remains open to argument.^[1][2][3]

At a glance

• ArtistJean-Michel Basquiat
• TitleObnoxious Liberals
• Date1982
• MaterialsAcrylic, oilstick and spray paint on canvas
• Dimensions172.72 × 259.08 cm (68 × 102 in.)
• CollectionThe Broad, Los Angeles
• AccessionB-BASQ-2P84.22; accession date 20 April 1984

The Broad's accession date belongs to its collection history, not to the year Basquiat painted the work. Its guide names Samson on the left, a central figure often taken as a self portrait, and a fedora-wearing figure at right. The word “often” matters. The museum records an established reading rather than an artist-authored identification of the figure.^[1][2]

Contents

1. Three figures across one field
2. What does “not for sale” refuse?
3. Samson, power and the body
4. The right-hand figure and signs of money
5. A work of 1982
6. Collection history and later readings
7. Looking again

Three figures across one field

The canvas stretches more than two and a half metres horizontally. In the Broad's reproduced image, a dark figure on the left raises both arms between tall vertical forms. “SAMSON” appears above him, while “ASBESTOS” is repeated higher up. A larger red zone holds the central head and body. The right figure is shorter and wears a brimmed hat; dollar signs mark the area around and on him. These are three different kinds of pictorial space, but the marks travel among them. Black lines, white openings and blue passages keep the zones from behaving like independent panels.^[1][2]

The left figure is tied to the name of Samson, the strongman of the Hebrew Bible. The Broad reads him as chained to two pillars within an atmosphere of asbestos. Fondation Louis Vuitton later described Samson here as an emancipatory figure. These accounts invite attention to strength under constraint, yet the exact painted posture should not be simplified into an image of effortless liberation. The raised arms and surrounding verticals create pressure; the words situate that pressure within a field that also contains money and a statement of refusal.^[2][4]

“ASBESTOS” is a striking choice to repeat near Samson. It names a harmful industrial material, not a character in the biblical account. The Broad's phrase “toxic air” is one way to make the word and the figure interact. Another viewer may first see the repeated capitals as part of the architecture surrounding him. Both responses start with what is there: a word repeated, a dark body, constraining uprights and the figure's extended arms. To go further requires an interpretation of how danger and confinement operate together.^[2]

The central figure appears against a strong red area. The title words sit above, while “NOT FOR SALE” is written across the lower body. The Broad's guide suggests that a hand full of arrows could represent painting and says that this figure is often considered Basquiat himself. Such a reading links the painted refusal to an artist resisting the market's claim on his work or body. Yet the dark block above the face and the clothing can also suggest a hat and suit. The visible image does not remove the ambiguity by naming the person.^[2][3]

At right, a hat, dollar signs and crossed-out eyes gather around a pale pink face and body. The Broad links the X-shaped eyes to a symbol Basquiat encountered in Henry Dreyfuss's Symbol Sourcebook, giving more than one possible sense for it. Even if the sign can be traced to a printed source, the right figure cannot be reduced to that one mark. The dollar signs, scale and position make him different from Samson and the central figure, but do not establish a specific person's name, occupation or political party.^[2]

The strong blue passages along the lower edge and on the right make the three figures share a ground. Broad colour terms are useful here because they can be checked against the authorised reproduction. Claims about “rage” as the meaning of red, or “purity” as the meaning of white, go beyond what the record can establish. Colour organises attention and contrast; its psychological effect will vary among viewers. The material record is more exact: Basquiat used acrylic, oilstick and spray paint on canvas, not a single undifferentiated medium.^[1][2]

What does “not for sale” refuse?

The phrase across the central body is legible and direct. In ordinary language it refuses a transaction. Inside this painting it sits among signs of restriction and money, so the question becomes what—or who—is being priced. The Broad's guide uses curator Franklin Sirmans's description of the Black body as a guarded commodity and connects the work to a capitalist art world that could profit from Basquiat while presenting him as a celebrated individual. That is a curatorial reading anchored in the canvas and its historical setting, not a private statement from Basquiat explaining every mark.^[2]

The phrase can also point toward the historical sale of human beings. The relation between an art market and the history of slavery must be handled with care: a painting changing hands is not the same event as a person being sold. Brown's scholarly essay reads the canvas through the structural positions of a slave auction, with Samson at one side, a buyer-like figure at the other and the central figure in the intermediary position. This makes the placement of “NOT FOR SALE” ironic in a different way. The words may belong to someone implicated in the system he appears to reject.^[3]

That account disputes an easy identification of the central figure with the artist. Brown argues that the top-hatted form resembles a trader more than an artist. He quotes curator Dieter Buchhart asking whether the centre depicts a trader attacking liberals or an artist refusing sale; Brown's own answer is much firmer than Buchhart's question. The argument is useful because it treats placement, dress and the two inscriptions together. It remains Brown's interpretation. There is no cited artist testimony that identifies the figure conclusively as Basquiat or as a trader.^[3]

The Broad's reading and Brown's do not disagree about the existence of the words or the broad concern with commodification. They disagree about the force of the central figure and the direction of the painting's irony. Under one account, the body marked “NOT FOR SALE” speaks a protective refusal; under the other, the refusal is compromised by the role of the person who carries it. A reader can test both by looking at the figure's clothing, its relation to Samson and the dollar-marked figure, and the placement of the title in the red field.^[2][3]

This uncertainty is part of the work's intelligence. The title names a political target, but the painted label does not tell us whether it is voiced from the left, the right or a position caught in its own contradictions. Brown argues against restricting the insult to a conservative slogan. The museum guide emphasises Basquiat's conflict with a market that celebrated and commodified him. Both readings make the words politically active; neither should be presented as a transcription of Basquiat's unrecorded intention in 1982.^[2][3]

Samson, power and the body

Samson introduces a story of strength, capture and destructive release. The Fondation Louis Vuitton's retrospective treats the figure as emancipatory, while the Broad describes him as chained. Both points can fit the same pictorial situation: potential power and present constraint. The painting does not require viewers to reconstruct every episode in the biblical narrative. The name supplies a reference; the raised dark body between vertical structures gives the reference its immediate visual form.^[2][4]

His placement also matters for readings of the central figure. If Samson is seen as a person under force, the person between him and the money-marked figure may appear to mediate a transaction or to challenge it. Brown makes that compositional relation central to his slave-auction analogy. The Broad instead presents the middle as a possible self image resisting sale. Neither reading can ignore the bound figure at left. An interpretation of “NOT FOR SALE” that looks only at the words on one body would miss the scene around it.^[2][3]

The word “ASBESTOS” prevents Samson from being enclosed entirely in an ancient story. It carries a modern industrial association into the space above him. Basquiat regularly placed words from different registers next to figures, but the relation between this particular word and Samson should be explored within this canvas before it becomes a general theory of his symbols. The combination is unsettling: a figure known for strength is surrounded by the language of harm. The work lets the figure remain named and recognisable while refusing a simple heroic portrait.^[2][4]

The right-hand figure and signs of money

The right figure's hat and dollar signs invite readings of wealth and ownership. The Broad guide calls him squat and notes the X marks over his eyes. Those observations are more secure than identifying him as “Uncle Sam,” a specific politician or the representative of one whole nation. The resemblance of a hat to a familiar American costume is not enough to prove a named identity, especially when its shape and colour are not a full emblem. The money signs do, however, visibly place him in the same field as “NOT FOR SALE.”^[2]

The Broad's guide traces a possible source for the X eyes to Dreyfuss's Symbol Sourcebook. It also gives two possible meanings. A source book can explain how Basquiat found a sign without determining how that sign works after he painted it beside dollar marks and a hat. The right figure may look incapacitated, watchful, opportunistic or absurd depending on what else the viewer attends to. A confident single translation of his eyes would conceal the uncertainty the museum itself records.^[2]

Scale alters the encounter among the figures. The right figure is shorter, but the dollar signs and hat give him visual prominence. The central red field is large, yet the writing across it means the viewer reads it as well as sees a body. Samson's raised arms spread outward into the vertical structures. None of the figures simply occupies a separate slot in a row of three; they press toward a shared argument about force, speech and value.^[2]

A work of 1982

The Broad dates the painting to 1982 and records its accession in 1984. The biography places that year after the 1981 Modena exhibition and within the period of the first US solo at Annina Nosei Gallery and wider international presentation. That chronology gives a setting for the museum guide's art-market reading without proving that the painting comments on a particular sale or dealer. It is enough to know that Basquiat was making work while new institutions and collectors took notice.^[1][5]

The painting was included in Fondation Louis Vuitton's 2018 retrospective among works on heroes, warriors and racial power. Its pairing there with the subject of Samson was a curatorial choice made decades after 1982, but it highlights a feature actually named within the canvas. The same exhibition placed Slave Auction nearby in a discussion of histories of oppression. Comparing them can illuminate Basquiat's repeated attention to bodies under power; it cannot make their subjects identical. One names an auction explicitly, while the other contains a debated political phrase and a figure named Samson.^[4]

Irony of a Negro Policeman gives another way to test how Basquiat puts a Black figure in relation to an institution. Its title, visual signs and historical questions differ from those in Obnoxious Liberals. A cluster of works can show recurring concerns with race, authority and value only if the evidence for each work stays distinct. A shared concern is not a hidden master key that makes all painted heads interchangeable.^[4]

Collection history and later readings

The Broad's object record identifies the painting by accession number B-BASQ-2P84.22. Its 20 April 1984 accession date tells us when it entered that collection's records, not when the first viewer encountered it or how every prior owner understood it. The museum guide gives an interpretation that can be checked against the work, while Brown's essay belongs to later scholarly debate. Both are part of the painting's reception, separate from the event of its making.^[1][2][3]

A later museum guide can speak with authority about a work it holds, but interpretation still has authors and limits. The Broad's phrase “often considered” preserves doubt about the self-portrait; Brown presses that doubt into a different compositional argument. The disagreement does not require choosing a winner before the painting can be introduced. It helps a viewer see the evidence each reading uses. Inscription, posture, costume, position and historical context all matter more than a simple assertion that the central person “is Basquiat.”^[2][3]

Nor does the painting require the assertion that Picasso's Guernica was its direct model. Large scale, political violence and emphatic figures can make comparison tempting, but shared features do not establish a specific influence. An argument for direct borrowing would need a closer formal chain or source documentation. The political work of Obnoxious Liberals is already visible through its own named figures, materials and words. Reading it first on those terms leaves any cross-artist comparison open to proper testing rather than treating resemblance as proof.^[1][2]

Looking again

Look at the authorised reproduction in The Broad's collection record. First follow the three figures from Samson to the central body and the dollar-marked figure. Then read the words across the top, left and centre. On a third pass, watch how the black lines and blue patches cross the apparent divisions of the scene. The painting is protected, so it is linked rather than reproduced here; the museum's guide supplies a fuller interpretation beside its image.^[1][2]

The most useful question is not which slogan sums up the work. It is how a refusal can be painted amid figures who seem to be bound, priced or able to price others. The central role can remain unsettled while the canvas's pressure becomes clearer. Obnoxious Liberals asks readers to make sense of power through words and bodies that do not line up as a neat moral cartoon. Its 1982 date and collection record are firm; the argument about its figures is ongoing.^[1][2][3]

Frequently Asked Questions

References and further reading

1. The Broad, Obnoxious Liberals collection record, accession B-BASQ-2P84.22, date, medium and dimensions.
2. The Broad, Basquiat digital guide, p. 6, reproduced work and institutional reading of Samson, the central figure, right figure, writing and Dreyfuss sign source. The guide says the self-portrait identification is common, not certain.
3. Nathan Brown, “The Irony of Anatomy,” Radical Philosophy 195 (2016), pp. 13–14, an alternative reading of the central figure and its relation to the other two. Brown quotes Dieter Buchhart's 2015 catalogue essay; the Buchhart passage is used here through Brown's quotation.
4. Fondation Louis Vuitton, 2018 Jean-Michel Basquiat retrospective, Gallery 5 account naming Samson in this painting and separately placing Slave Auction among works that address the slave trade.
5. Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1980s chronology, 1981–82 exhibition sequence.