NEW YORK, NY.- The posthumous rivalry between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat for the title of America’s biggest-selling artist at auction resumed Wednesday night at Phillips in Manhattan, when a 1982 Basquiat painting of a horned devil reappeared on the market and sold for $85 million with fees. It was the third-highest price paid for a Basquiat work, and the winning bid was from Asia, taken by phone with a representative of Phillips in Taipei, Taiwan.
A third-party guarantor had ensured the painting would sell for at least $70 million. At more than 16 feet wide, the 1982 “Untitled” canvas, featuring one of Basquiat’s trademark African-style masks floating in front of an abstracted, drip-painted background, was one of the artist’s most monumental paintings. It also had a history of making monumental auction prices.
In 2004, the painting was bought for a then-imposing $4.5 million by New York collector and dealer Adam Lindemann, who sold it at auction in 2016 for a then-record $57.3 million to Japanese online retail billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. That record was obliterated the following year, when Maezawa paid $110.5 million for one of Basquiat’s coveted large-scale skull paintings, also dating from 1982. That price, the highest ever paid at auction for a work by an American artist, was beaten last week, when the 1964 silk-screen “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn,” by Basquiat’s friend and mentor Warhol, sold for $195 million at Christie’s.
“Basquiat connotes cool kids, misfits, the unhinged genius,” said Andrew Terner, a private dealer and collector who lent a painting to a 2019 exhibition, “Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: The Untold Story,” at the Guggenheim in New York. “Basquiat is not just an artist; for a lot of the people out there, he’s a religion.”
On a night of sustained demand, one lot before the $85 million Basquiat, a rare early white “Untitled (Nets)” painting from 1959 by the ever-admired Yayoi Kusama sold, almost unnoticed, for a record for the artist: $10.5 million.
Phillips’ sale totaled $224.9 million, the highest in the company’s history, and all 36 lots sold.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
