Two paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat that have never before been up for auction sold for a combined hammer price of $46.7m ($54.3m including auction house fees) at Phillips on Tuesday evening (14 May), marking a win for the auction house on the second night of New York’s spring auction season.
The eight-foot-wide painting Untitled (ELMAR), from Basquiat’s most sought-after year of 1982, sold for $40.2m ($46.4m with fees) to a phone bidder after three minutes of bidding. With a $40m to $60m estimate, it had the highest estimate of any single lot on offer during this season’s New York auctions.
The following lot, Untitled (Portrait of a Famous Ballplayer) (1981), sold for a hammer price equal to its low estimate of $6.5m; with fees, the price came to $7.8m. In the painting, Basquiat explored baseball references and Black identity and inclusion in American culture, according to Phillips.
Basquiat’s Untitled (Portrait of a Famous Ballplayer) (1981) Courtesy Phillips
The two paintings came from the collection of late Italian anthropologist Francesco Pellizzi, who died last year. Phillips will sell a third Basquiat painting from Pellizzi’s collection in Hong Kong on 31 May. Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, Amorites on Safari (1982) carries an estimate between $12m and $18m. Jean-Paul Engelen, the president of Phillips America, said before Tuesday’s sale that they decided to sell one of the canvases in Asia to “divvy up” the results for Pellizzi’s family, noting the Asian market is particularly enthusiastic about Basquiat.
When Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa sold off an untitled 1982 painting by Basquiat at Phillips in 2022, it sold for $85m with fees to a bidder in Asia. (Maezawa also set the auction record for a work by Basquiat in 2017, when he bought an untitled 1982 canvas for $110.5m, including fees, at Sotheby’s.) Basquiat also holds the record for the most valuable western artist to sell at auction in Asia, after his Warrior (1982) sold for HK$280m (HK$323.6m/$41.7m with fees) at Christie’s Hong Kong in 2021.
Pellizzi acquired the three paintings from Annina Nosei, Basquiat’s first art dealer. According to Engelen, he purchased Untitled (ELMAR) for $14,000, Untitled (Portrait of a Famous Ballplayer) for $12,000 and Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, Amorites on Safari for $6,000, respectively.
Sotheby’s kicked off the week’s major evening auctions with a double-header sale on Monday (13 May) that saw mixed results but nevertheless brought in a total of $227.9m.
Another Basquiat painting will come up for sale later Tuesday night at Christie’s, which has been plagued by technology issues after an apparent cyberattack last week. The Italian Version of Popeye has no Pork in his Diet (1982), is expected to sell for around $30m, according to Christie’s.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated with a full report from the Phillips sale after it concludes.
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