Riding with Death by Jean-Michel Basquiat

Riding with Death by Jean-Michel Basquiat: introduction

In Riding with Death, a dark human figure sits on a pale, skeletal creature against a broad golden ground. Jean-Michel Basquiat painted it in 1988, the last year of his life. Its title and date have encouraged readers to see an autobiographical farewell. The painting invites thought about mortality, but that story can narrow what is visible: two unlike bodies, an unstable relation between rider and mount, and an art-historical motif remade at a striking scale. Fondation Beyeler, which exhibited the work in 2010, expressly cautioned that it was not Basquiat's last work.^[1][2]

The painting has a documented life beyond that fatal association. It appeared in Basquiat's April 1988 exhibition at Vrej Baghoomian Gallery and has been shown in later New York, Basel and Paris contexts. Museum and gallery records give a clear object identity, while the precise book image from which Basquiat drew the Leonardo-related motif remains a research question. Beginning with those differences between known facts and compelling interpretations makes the painting richer, not colder.^[1][3][4]

At a glance

• ArtistJean-Michel Basquiat
• TitleRiding with Death
• Date1988
• MaterialsAcrylic and oil crayon on canvas, in Fondation Beyeler's 2010 exhibition record
• Dimensions249 × 289.5 cm, height × width, in the Beyeler record
• Historical collection creditPrivate collection in Beyeler's 2010 and Fondation Louis Vuitton's 2018 records; current owner and display location unconfirmed

At almost three metres wide, this is a large painting. Its open ground can look like an empty backdrop in a small digital reproduction, but that breadth is a material part of the encounter. The figures occupy a central relationship within a field large enough to give them space and exposure. A viewer close to the original would see the painted and drawn gestures at bodily scale. The dimensions matter before any symbolic scheme is imposed on the two figures.^[1]

Contents

1. Two figures and a wide field
2. The gold ground is part of the story
3. Leonardo, Envy and a transformed motif
4. The late-work context without a prophecy
5. Exhibition and collection history
6. Looking again

Two figures and a wide field

One figure is recognisably human and seated or balanced above the other. The lower figure is made from sparse pale bones and a head that turns outward. It can be read as a skeletal horse or as a more ambiguous four-legged creature. The painting supplies enough cues to understand riding, while declining the smooth, anatomically complete animal one might expect from a conventional equestrian portrait. The rider is dark, angular and only partially resolved. This contrast gives the encounter its tension: a human body depends on a body whose structure is visibly broken down.^[1][5]

The pose does not yield a simple account of mastery. Ordinarily the rider controls a mount. Here the mounted creature is what the title calls Death, or at least what viewers are invited to identify with death. If the rider seems to command it, the rider also relies on it for movement. The image can therefore suggest control and dependence at once. It is possible to reverse the question and ask whether the creature carries the person willingly or bears a weight it cannot escape. These are visual readings, not claims that Basquiat assigned each figure one fixed allegorical role.^[1][5]

The upper figure's face offers few conventional portrait details. That spareness has led some writers to identify it as Basquiat himself, but the available museum record does not name it as a self-portrait. A dark body in one of his paintings cannot automatically be translated into the artist's body. The picture may invite a personal reading, especially given its date, yet a named likeness needs more than resemblance and biography. Treating the rider as a figure first preserves the painting's openness to other relations: living and dead, rider and vehicle, balance and collapse.^[1][2]

The lower head is important because it is not simply a platform under the rider. It faces the viewer, while the human form looks less direct. The pale skull makes the lower creature at once conspicuous and incomplete. It can appear horse-like, human-like or deliberately in between. That uncertainty matters. To call it a realistic skeleton would imply a level of anatomical specificity the work does not provide; to dismiss it as a careless drawing would miss how few lines Basquiat uses to establish a living relation between the forms.^[5]

Look, too, at what the canvas omits. There is no extensive setting, scene of pursuit or written explanation around the pair. Basquiat often built works from densely layered words and signs; here the relative sparseness makes the silhouettes and ground do much of the work. The words, anatomy and symbols guide explores those recurring methods across other works. Fondation Louis Vuitton placed Riding with Death among the artist's late works and described the way this phase could move between dense surfaces and radical openness. The painting belongs to that formal experiment, even if mortality is one of its themes.^[1][4]

The gold ground is part of the story

The ground is often casually called brown or beige. Fondation Beyeler's 2010 gallery text calls attention instead to its gold quality. Curator Dieter Buchhart connects it to the gold, silver and copper hues Basquiat had used since Cadillac Moon in 1981. That observation matters because it places the colour within a longer practice rather than treating it solely as a late expression of despair. A warm metallic or gold field can evoke icons and older painting traditions; it can also function as a stark colour plane against which fragile drawn bodies stand out.^[1][2]

The historical comparison is a curator's reading, not a material analysis of this canvas. The Beyeler object label identifies acrylic and oil crayon, but its text does not establish the exact pigment recipe behind the ground. Nor does colour prove that Basquiat intended a religious image. The gold association is a useful way of looking: it encourages us to examine whether this apparently bare field has visual weight and art-historical resonance. It should not be inflated into a statement that every part of the canvas was painted with actual metal or that the work has one sacred meaning.^[1][2]

Fondation Louis Vuitton's account of its 2018–19 retrospective also saw in the painting a complex inheritance involving Renaissance art, icon painting and more radical twentieth-century currents. These are relationships proposed by the exhibition's curators. They help explain why an image with few components can feel old and new at once. Basquiat did not have to imitate the finish of a Renaissance panel or Orthodox icon to work with the broad idea of a figure set against a charged field. The visible result is a painting that resists the assumption that few marks mean few sources.^[4]

The space around the figures also affects time. With no detailed landscape, the pair seem held in an indefinite place. The eye moves between the rider, the exposed bones and the broad painted ground rather than along a narrated route. A title containing riding proposes motion, yet the picture holds that motion in one concentrated arrangement. The gap between implied journey and fixed image is one reason the work stays troubling without needing a private diary explanation.^[1][4]

Leonardo, Envy and a transformed motif

Beyeler's gallery guide says Basquiat took the motif from a book of works by Leonardo da Vinci. It does not name the exact book, page or original sheet. Art-historical writing has identified Leonardo's drawing known as Allegory of Envy, held at Christ Church in Oxford, as the close comparandum. A University of Plymouth study makes that identification explicitly. The link is persuasive at the level of a figure riding a skeletal form, but a scholar's identification is not the same thing as a verified photograph of the book open in Basquiat's studio. The precise route by which that design reached him remains to be documented.^[2][6]

Leonardo's own allegorical notes help explain why later viewers have made the connection. In a nineteenth-century published transcription, Leonardo directs that Envy be shown riding Death. That older text gives the rider-and-death relation a specific place within Leonardo's moral imagery. It does not show that Basquiat copied a particular sheet, retained Leonardo's labels or intended his rider to be Envy. Image, text and transmission have to be kept separate. Beyeler's statement establishes a Leonardo book source in its curatorial account; the Oxford drawing and the notebook phrase clarify the proposed family resemblance.^[2][6][7]

Comparison also reveals transformation. Leonardo's allegorical scheme is tied to named personifications and explanatory text. Basquiat's canvas presents a dark rider, a pale skeletal body and little that fixes either role. Its broad ground and rough anatomy expand the motif into a different pictorial situation. An influence need not be a copy. Indeed, the most interesting question may be what disappears when the old allegory is remade without a full set of labels and attributes. The title preserves Death but leaves the rider unnamed.^[1][2][6][7]

Basquiat's engagement with Leonardo was wider than this one canvas. Princeton University Art Museum's record of his 1982 Leonardo da Vinci's Greatest Hits describes anatomical drawings and scattered body parts throughout that work. The earlier painting's very title announces the connection. It does not prove which Leonardo page prompted Riding with Death six years later, but it shows why looking for an art-historical source is reasonable. Basquiat studied, sampled and rearranged older imagery within his own visual language.^[8]

There is a risk in turning that borrowing into a false opposition between “European learning” and some supposedly unlearned instinct. Terms such as “primitive” and “naive” fail to account for the painting's informed conversation with Leonardo. A viewer can describe its deliberately spare drawing while recognising that its chosen motif sits inside an informed conversation with Leonardo. Roughness of line is a formal choice one can analyse; it is not evidence of an absence of knowledge.^[2][4][8]

The late-work context without a prophecy

Basquiat made Riding with Death in 1988 and died later that year. The biography sets that final period within the whole of his short career. The chronology is unavoidable, but the painting was not his last work. Beyeler states this plainly and warns that the painting nevertheless became an icon of his death and a source of the myth around him. A late date can make a work feel retrospective to a later audience. It cannot make the artist know the exact future or turn every visual element into an omen.^[2]

The 1988 Eroica I and Eroica II offer a more concrete late-work comparison. Beyeler's room guide discusses their repeated words “MAN DIES” as an explicit encounter with death as a subject. Its account also says the two sheets had initially formed one work before Basquiat cut them apart. Galerie Bruno Bischofberger's chronology places those works alongside Riding with Death in the April 1988 Vrej Baghoomian show. Death was one of the subjects Basquiat could address through multiple forms: repeated words in one case, a mounted pair of figures in another. The works should be compared for their different methods, not merged into a single coded farewell.^[2][3]

The gallery show is significant because Riding with Death was publicly displayed during Basquiat's lifetime. A later story that begins only with posthumous retrospectives erases that original exhibition context. The Bischofberger chronology confirms the April 1988 inclusion, while a surviving exhibition account at Gallery 98 describes the work as conspicuous in the show. Such records anchor a viewer's sense of when and where the painting entered public view, without claiming to recover every 1988 visitor's response.^[3][9]

Gagosian's 2013 exhibition release compared Riding with Death with Bicycle Man from 1984, noting how an earlier rider image could be set beside the late skeletal mount. That comparison is useful formally: both paintings concern a human figure, a vehicle or carrier and motion. The release then moves into a strongly biographical account of addiction and an ending. Its exhibition framing can be considered, but its psychological certainty is not a fact derived from the canvas. The earlier bicycle and later skeletal form make a visual question worth testing without providing a diagnosis of the artist.^[10]

The painting's reception has repeatedly emphasised an elegiac ending. That is part of how the public has seen it. It is also an interpretive overlay. A reader who knows only the date and title may miss the active rider, the unstable relationship to the skeletal creature and the visual weight of the gold ground. The work can speak about death and still be part of Basquiat's sustained experimentation with materials, source images, figure and space. Beyeler's warning helps keep both possibilities available.^[1][2][4]

Exhibition and collection history

After its 1988 showing, the painting appeared in later exhibitions. Gagosian records it in The Physical World in New York in 2002 and again in its 2013 Basquiat exhibition. Fondation Beyeler included it in the 2010 Basel retrospective and documented its material, dimensions and then-private collection. Fondation Louis Vuitton placed it among the final galleries of its 2018–19 Paris retrospective. Those are dated display records, not evidence that any of the institutions owns the painting now.^{[1][4][10][11]}

The collection credit remains appropriately modest. Beyeler's published record says “private collection” in 2010; Fondation Louis Vuitton's 2018 announcement also gives a private collection. Neither names a current owner. Online reproductions and exhibition photographs can remain visible long after a loan has ended, so a website should not infer present display from past photographs. The page can tell readers where to find reliable institutional descriptions while leaving the current location open until a recent lender or owner record appears.^[1][4]

The history of display also explains shifting readings. A work shown with other new paintings in 1988 could be encountered as one part of an evolving practice. In a retrospective organised after the artist's death, it is easy for the late date to make it a concluding image. Fondation Louis Vuitton did place it near the end of a chronological presentation, yet its text also traced several historical art traditions through the picture. Context influences emphasis; no one installation exhausts the work.^[3][4]

Looking again

Begin with scale. Imagine a canvas almost three metres wide, then follow the rider's dark line and the lower form's pale bones. Ask where the mounted relation looks stable and where it appears precarious. Notice whether the broad gold-brown ground recedes like background or seems to press forward as colour in its own right. Only then return to the title. Does Death seem to be what is ridden, the act of riding, or the condition surrounding both figures? The painting need not give a single answer for the question to be productive.^[1][2][5]

Next, place it beside the documented sources. Leonardo's allegorical pairing offers one history of a figure riding Death, and Basquiat's earlier Leonardo da Vinci's Greatest Hits shows an established interest in that artist. The Eroica works show a different late treatment of mortality. These relationships expand the picture beyond biography. The artist's death in 1988 shaped its later reception, but the viewer can still attend to choices made in paint, drawing, scale and source adaptation.^[2][3][7][8]

Finally, distinguish the image from claims attached to it. It is a 1988 painting with a recorded material and size, a documented 1988 exhibition and later museum showings. It is not documented as Basquiat's last painting. Its rider is not securely identified as a self-portrait. The exact Leonardo book page remains to be verified. Those limits make room to ask what the work actually does: turn a centuries-old allegorical possibility into a wide, spare, uneasy encounter between two bodies.^[1][2][3][6]

The Fondation Beyeler exhibition account and Fondation Louis Vuitton retrospective record offer authoritative descriptions and historical context. Their online images do not convey a right to reproduce the painting here. This text-led account does not embed the work or the held image files from the migrated site.^[1][4]

Frequently Asked Questions

References and further reading

1. Fondation Beyeler, 2010 Basquiat exhibition page, object label: 1988, acrylic and oil crayon on canvas, 249 × 289.5 cm, then private collection.
2. Dieter Buchhart, Fondation Beyeler's German Basquiat gallery guide (2010), room 10, pp. 22–23, Leonardo-book source, gold ground, comparison with Eroica I and II, and explicit warning that this was not the last work.
3. Galerie Bruno Bischofberger, Basquiat biography and chronology, April 1988 Vrej Baghoomian Gallery showing of Riding with Death and the Eroica works.
4. Fondation Louis Vuitton, Jean-Michel Basquiat 2018–19 exhibition account, late-work placement and curatorial interpretation; 2018 exhibition announcement, historical private-collection credit.
5. Gallery 98, “Basquiat's Last Exhibition, 1988”, contemporary exhibition ephemera and a later visual description of the sparse, skeletal mount; description is not used as a source for the artist's intent.
6. A. Ross, Gold Griot: Jean-Michel Basquiat Telling (His) Story in Art, University of Plymouth PhD thesis (2018), scholarly identification of Leonardo's Allegory of Envy as a source image. The exact book image available to Basquiat is not independently established here.
7. Leonardo da Vinci, allegorical note transcribed in Jean Paul Richter, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1880), item 677, Envy represented riding Death. This is a historical textual parallel, not a Basquiat statement.
8. Princeton University Art Museum, Leonardo da Vinci's Greatest Hits (1982) object record, evidence of Basquiat's earlier Leonardo engagement.
9. Gallery 98, 1988 Vrej Baghoomian exhibition account and invitation, surviving ephemera and description of the work's place in the show.
10. Gagosian, 2013 Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition release, Bicycle Man comparison and dated later display; biographical reading treated as interpretation.
11. Gagosian, The Physical World, 2002 exhibition record, Riding with Death exhibition documentation.