Jean-Michel Basquiat
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. 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.
If you own a work by Jean-Michel Basquiat
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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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.