An untitled 1984 painting by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat will sell at Sotheby’s in May at its contemporary art evening sale, becoming one of the top lots of that marquee auction week.
The photo will be the first to appear at auction since it was also sold at Sotheby’s in 2010 for $2.65 million. Sotheby’s has put its estimate at $18 million this time, which means that if it sells for that price, the value will increase more than sixfold.
The work is part of a famous and polarizing group of paintings that the two art stars collaborated on between 1984 and 1985. Basquiat was much younger than Warhol, who at the time saw him as an aging Pop artist in search of relevance. Some have accused Warhol of parasitically feeding off Basquiat’s popularity with these works, which combine the former’s consumerist imagery with the latter’s skull- and graffiti-like drawings.
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But today, Basquiat-Warhol collaborations are largely remembered fondly. An extensive show dedicated to the series appeared at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris last year. The untitled painting, which was on its way to Sotheby’s, appeared in a repeat of the New York show at the Brant Foundation, an art space run by collector Peter Brant.
In 2022, it was also a theatrical hit collaboration, which focused on the years Warhol and Basquiat worked together.
Speaking about the untitled work headed for auction, Lucius Elliott, Sotheby’s head of the evening’s sales of art from recent decades, said. ARTnews, “It’s really the pinnacle of their collaboration. By 1984, they had been working together for a year. They grew comfortable enough to push and pull the canvas. Things were deleted. Things came up. But the two artists fully exist on the canvas, working in different languages of the same theme.’
Basquiat-Warhol paintings typically do well at auction, although the net prices are far from the eight- and nine-figure sums these artists usually fetch individually. The record for one of the Basquiat-Warhol photographs is $11.3 million, achieved at Phillips’ May 2014 evening sale of contemporary art in New York.
