Minor Success is an immensely powerful work from the very earliest phase of Basquiat’s career; it is prominently featured in a series of photographs taken of Basquiat at the Annina Nosei Gallery in 1982, only two years after the work was executed. Minor Success features three of the artist’s best-known motifs – the car, the mask-like head, and the golden crown – painted with bold simplicity on the surface of a mirrored cupboard door. In this iconic work, this trio of subjects firmly establish the central tenets of Basquiat’s oeuvre. It serves almost as a coda to his early paintings, an adumbration of the subjects that he would recapitulate throughout his career, and the unmistakeable product of an artist who was inextricably linked with the downtown New York scene.

1980, the year of the present work’s creation, was a watershed moment for Basquiat. Following his participation in the politically engaged and zeitgeist- fuelled phenomenon that was The Times Square Show in June, Basquiat was invited by Diego Cortez to exhibit in the similarly underground, yet, by comparison, highly curated project, New York/New Wave at MoMA P.S. 1 – a rundown former school in Long Island. This exhibition defined a moment, and, to quote critic and curator Carlo McCormack, enshrined “downtown’s greatest attribute: hipness as signifier… it worked the methodologies of exhibition design to create stars, including a still teenage artist, then listed under the name SAMO©, given a room to create a bold installation of some twenty paintings. Amazing his own peer group and attracting a coterie of international dealers, it is reported that on the morning after the opening Basquiat would return to his childhood home in Brooklyn and announce, ‘Papa I’ve made it!’” (Carlo McCormack, ‘Exhibitionism’ in: Exh. Cat., London, Basquiat: Boom for Real, Barbican Centre, 2017, p. 71).

The iconic motifs established in this extraordinary work echo throughout the rest of Basquiat’s oeuvre, and form the core of his visual language. The three- pointed crown – which exists in gold on the top panel of the present work – is his best known: the symbol of his artistic primacy and his aesthetic calling-card. The mask-like face is similarly important. It’s appearance in this work pays tribute to Basquiat’s relentless exploration of cultural identity. The artist, who was born to a Haitian father and Puerto-Rican mother, often expressed his feelings of otherness in a white-dominated art world. Basquiat’s use of the mask, a sacred object which historically functions in the black diaspora as a mediator between the physical and spiritual realms, now becomes an unapologetic visual metaphor for black identity.

These cultural signifiers persistently appear in the artist’s prolific body of work in varying forms, from Hip-Hop informed poetic texts and musings on black historical events to Jazz references in paintings depicting Charlie Parker. In early works like Minor Success one can thus observe Basquiat’s worldly, perceptive grasp of the complex interrelatedness of history, society and culture, even from the very outset of his career. The car also holds meaning: not only the ultimate symbol of wealth and status in 1980s America, but also a motif with personal significance to Basquiat. As a child, he was involved in a serious car accident whilst playing outside his home and spent months in hospital in convalescence. During this time, he trawled visual reference books: everything from Gray’s Anatomy to artist’s monographs. This formative experience was the catalyst for of the densely referenced art that Basquiat created in adulthood.

Raw, unabashed, direct, and poetic, Minor Success exemplifies the work of a young, groundbreaking artist on the verge of unrivalled success. This storied painting serves as a conceptual root to Basquiat’s oeuvre: establishing three of his most important motifs, and asserting the depictive power for which he became famous.