$ 93 million for a Basquiat painting in New York, 100 times more than twenty years ago

Table In This Case by Jean-Michel Basquiat 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 estimate of $ 50 million provided by Christie’s.

Sign of the change of status of Basquiat, today in the pantheon of painting, the same canvas was sold, in November 2002, for only 999,500 dollars, barely more than a hundredth of the price paid on Tuesday, less than twenty years later.

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

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

It’s another skull, Untitled, of similar inspiration, which retains the record for a painting by Basquiat (1960-1988), with $ 110.5 million in May 2017 at Sotheby’s in New York.

With the exception of Basquiat, African American painters have long been underestimated by collectors and underrepresented in museums. In recent years, the market has started a process of re-evaluating many of them. Tuesday, May 11, 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.

–