Painting by Haitian-Puerto Rican Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat Painting Sells for $41.7 Million Dollars

Painting by Haitian-Puerto Rican Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat Painting Sells for $41.7 Million Dollars & Becomes Most Expensive Western Art Sold in Asia

 

A 1982 painting by deceased Haitian-Puerto Rican artist Jean-Michel Basquiat sold for $41.9 million at Christie’s auction house in Hong Kong. The New York Times reported.

The piece titled “Warrior”.  The auctioned painting depicts the struggles Black men have to endure in a world dominated by White people.

The British auction house said the amount paid for the painting was the highest for an artwork by a Western artist in Asia, that is actually not Basquiat’s most valuable piece of work.

In 2017, his “Untitled” painting was purchased for $110 million by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa at a Sotheby’s auction in New York.

Sales in the art industry  have significantly taking a slump over the year as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, Christie’s was reportedly hopeful the inclusion of Basquiat’s artwork in the auction would help revitalize the art market.

“Basquiat is one of the strongest markets coming out of the pandemic,” Christophe van de Weghe, a dealer who specializes in Basquiat’s works, said in an interview “It’s worldwide. You can sell Basquiat, like Picasso, to someone in India or Kazakhstan or Mexico.

You can have a 28-year-old spending millions on Basquiat and you can have a guy who is 85. He appeals to all kinds of people, from rappers to hedge-fund guys.”

Though deceased, Basquiat is an important and rising figure in popular global arts and culture. He was born on December 22, 1960, to a Haitian father and a mother of Puerto-Rican descent in Brooklyn. In this multicultural home, the artist grew up speaking Spanish, French and English.

Basquiat experienced a great deal at a young age; he was in a car accident that resulted in a splenectomy at age seven, his parents divorced at the same age; his mother, who first introduced him to art, was committed into a mental institution, and he dropped out of school by the age of 15.

His father threw him out of the house when he dropped out of school at the age of seventeen. As a young teen Basquiat scraped by, selling sweatshirts and postcards marked with his drawings, panhandling and crashing with friends. His diet consisted primarily of cheap red wine and 15¢ bags of Cheetos.

His life on the streets surely influenced his interest in graffiti. He first gained public attention for his graffiti tag “SAMO” – short-hand for “same-old shit” created by Basquiat and his high school friend, Al Diaz.

But within a few years, he went from being homeless and unemployed to selling his paintings for $25,000+, his art work was political and has its own fanfare.

Although many people know him for his celebrity status, as he was friends with pop artiste Andy Warhol, wore Armani suits splattered with paint from his work, and dated Madonna in 1982 while both were on the precipice of mainstream stardom.

 

 

Basquiat was intentional and well versed in the social issues of his time. He once said, “the black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings. I realized that I didn’t see many paintings with black people in them.”

Basquiat died at the age of 27 from a heroin overdose but he lives forever through his art and the impact of his work and influence on American movements and pop culture.

The early end to Basquiat’s prolific and promising life has long meant that there is a limit to just how many of his works exist in circulation within the art world.

At this Christie’s auction, three bidders fiercely competed for the painting until the auctioneer ultimately banged the auction house’s gavel. The final figure fetched far exceeded the $8.7 million that real estate mogul Aby Rosen paid for the work back in 2012.

While Christie’s declined to publicly comment as to whether Rosen was the seller at today’s single-lot sale, the painting’s value  implied as much.

Basquiat, people of color and Hip-Hop:
Artists of color have long identified with Basquiat, who became the first black American artist to become an international star in the 1980s, before his tragic death at the young age 27 in 1988.

His art is an avant-garde appropriation of African art imagery, articulating what it means to be black in America. “I realized I didn’t see many paintings with black people in them,” he once said, so he went ahead he depicted them, in many capacities, from Hollywood to jazz.

Art institutions still be seen as closed off to the public at large, but Basquiat’s art still serves as an entry point decades later. An example is in how hip-hop a community still often overlooked within the high art world, which has and continues to embraced Basquiat and his work to this day.

Basquiat had a history with hip-hop and was tied into the music and culture. In 1981, he showed up at the turntables in the first rap video to air on MTV, for Blondie’s “Rapture.”

He appears at Debbie Harry’s lyrical mention of Fab Five Freddy as a prominent graffiti artist, and also the primary curator during hip-hop’s formative days. It was lead singer Debbie Harry and her boyfriend Chris Stein who bought Basquiat’s first painting for a mere $200.

Basquiat produced  record with Rammellzee and K Robb titled Beat Bop in 1983 and designed the cover for the single.