Jean-Michel Basquiat valuation
SAMO on a Lower East Side wall at seventeen, and a career that lasted eight years.
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn in 1960 to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, left home at seventeen, and first became known for the SAMO graffiti he wrote with Al Diaz around SoHo and the Lower East Side.
What a work by Jean-Michel Basquiat is worth
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Bio
Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Brooklyn in 1960 to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, left home at seventeen, and first became known for the SAMO graffiti he wrote with Al Diaz around SoHo and the Lower East Side. By 1981 he was showing paintings; by 1982 he was in the Whitney; he collaborated with Andy Warhol from 1984; he died in 1988 at twenty-seven. The paintings pull together anatomy, jazz, boxing, the crown motif, West African and Caribbean reference, and long lists of crossed-out words — struck through, he said, so you would look at them harder.
Authentication is the dominant fact of this market. The Estate's authentication committee was dissolved in 2012 and no body now issues opinions, so a work's history is what carries it: early gallery records, exhibition history, the Nahmad and Mugrabi-era ownership chains, and documented provenance back towards the artist. Works on paper, oilstick and crayon drawings are numerous and vary enormously; the collaborations with Warhol are catalogued separately. Later editions and prints published posthumously by the Estate are a different and much broader market and are not the same thing as work made in his lifetime.
At a glance
- Born
- 22 December 1960, Park Slope
- Died
- 12 August 1988, New York City
- Movements
- Neo-Expressionism, Primitivism
More on Wikipedia.
The Times Square Show, Documenta and the dealers
Basquiat and Al Diaz began writing SAMO on Lower Manhattan buildings in May 1978, and when the two fell out in 1980 he wrote SAMO IS DEAD across SoHo. He played in the noise band Gray, founded with Michael Holman, and in June 1980 took part in the Times Square Show, where critics and curators first noticed him.
Annina Nosei took him on in September 1981 and gave him space to work in her gallery's basement. By the summer of 1982 Bruno Bischofberger was his worldwide dealer, and that June, at 21, he became the youngest artist ever to take part in Documenta in Kassel. A solo show at the Fun Gallery followed in November, and Larry Gagosian gave him a studio in Venice, California. For any work, the dealer and exhibition history from these years is what a buyer will want to see.
Postcards, MAN MADE and the drawings
Before the paintings he sold hand-made postcards in SoHo, one of them, Stupid Games, Bad Ideas, to Andy Warhol, and painted secondhand clothes under the label MAN MADE, which Patricia Field stocked in her Greenwich Village shop from November 1979. He appeared regularly on Glenn O'Brien's cable show TV Party and filmed Downtown 81 with him. His paintings and drawings were first shown in public at New York/New Wave at PS1 in 1981, and Rene Ricard's essay The Radiant Child in Artforum brought him to the art world.
He made about 1,500 drawings and some 600 paintings. Gray's Anatomy, given to him by his mother when he was in hospital at seven, Henry Dreyfuss's Symbol Sourcebook and Robert Farris Thompson's Flash of the Spirit were among his sources. Many drawings are untitled and are known by a word written in them, given in brackets after the title, and the estate's authentication committee, which sat from 1994 to 2012, reviewed more than 2,000 works, most of them drawings. In 1987 he designed a Ferris wheel for André Heller's Luna Luna, an artists' fairground in Hamburg.
Best auction results
- Untitled $110.5m
- Painting of a skull, 1982 · New York · 18 May 2017
- Publicly reported
- Bought by the collector Yusaku Maezawa. The artist's auction record.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
