“Portrait of an Artist as a Young Derelict” was made on three large panels that Basquiat had built himself. He painted it in 1982, a pivotal year during which he made “the best paintings ever,” as the artist once said.
For Christie’s, this painting synthesises “the artist’s masterful painterly abilities with his early experience of life on the streets.”
Basquiat depicted one of his iconic “heads” on the side panel, amidst a cacophony of words, signs and symbols serving as cultural markers for moments in the past, present and future.
“Portrait of an Artist as a Young Derelict” was included in a major exhibition that Basquiat organized at the Fun Gallery between November and December 1982.
It has since featured in numerous retrospectives dedicated to the artist, including one at the Brooklyn Museum in New York and another at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel.
However, the painting has remained in the same private collection for more than two decades. It will appear on the market for the first time in May at Christie’s “21st Century Evening Sale.”
The auction house estimates that it could go under the hammer for more than $30 million, Penta magazine reports.
“Basquiat mania”
“We are truly thrilled to offer Portrait of the Artist as a Young Derelict by Basquiat as a leading highlight of our 21st Century Evening Sale during this Spring’s Marquee Week.
“This is a rare work of self-portraiture, containing a rich multitude of references that touch upon all aspects of Basquiat’s life-ranging from his childhood to his meteoric rise to fame to ruminations of his own mortality,” said Ana Maria Celis, head of Christie’s New York 21st Century Evening Sale.
Another work by Basquiat will be auctioned during the same evening sale – “See Plate 3,” which the New York artist also made in 1982.
This sculpture remained in Keith Haring’s personal collection until his death in 1990. It is now estimated to fetch between US$4 and US$6 million.
For several years now, the art market has been gripped by a kind of “Basquiat mania,” especially when paintings from his “skulls” series come up for sale.
The 1982 work “Untitled,” for example, was acquired by the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa for US$110.5 million at Sotheby’s in 2017.
An unprecedented sum that sent Basquiat rocketing into the select club of artists to break the symbolic US$100 million mark at auction.
“He’s now in the same league as Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso,” the art dealer Jeffrey Deitch said at the time in The New York Times.