Basquiat painting sold for $ 93.1 million

A sign of the change in the artist’s status! Table In this case by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) was bought Tuesday for 93.1 million dollars at a sale organized in New York by the auction house Christie’s, the second highest price for the New York painter.

This 1.98 m by 1.87 m canvas, painted in 1983, which depicts a skull on a red background, sold for $ 81 million, raised to 93.1 with fees and commissions. The final price is well above the $ 50 million aid provided by Christie’s.

It’s another skull, Untitled, of similar inspiration, which retains the record for a painting by Basquiat, with $ 110.5 million in May 2017 at Sotheby’s in New York.

Two dominant themes in Basquiat’s work

In this case takes up two dominant themes of Basquiat’s work, anatomy and the representation of African-American characters.

The same canvas had been sold in November 2002 for only $ 999,500, barely more than a hundredth of the price paid on Tuesday, less than twenty years later.

In this case, which had been, since 2007, the property of a private collector who remained anonymous, was presented publicly for the last time during the exhibition organized at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, in Paris, in 2018-2019.

African-American painters reassessed

With the exception of Basquiat, African-American painters have long been underestimated by collectors and under-illustrated in museums. In recent years, the market has started a process of re-evaluating many of them. Tuesday, Christie’s had put forward several black artists on the occasion of its big spring sale.

Adopted New Yorkers Nina Chanel Abney ($ 990,000), Jordan Casteel (687,500) and Rashid Johnson (1.95 million), but also Briton Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (1.95 million) and Ghanaian plastic artist El Anatsui (1.95 million) all set new records in this sale.

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