The posthumous rivalry between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat for the title of America’s biggest-selling artist at auction resumed on Wednesday night at Phillips in Manhattan, when a 1982 Basquiat painting of a horned devil reappeared on the market and sold for $85 million with fees. It was the third-highest price paid for a Basquiat work, and the winning bid was from Asia, taken by phone with a representative of Phillips in Taipei, Taiwan.
A third-party guarantor had ensured the painting would sell for at least $70 million.At more than 16 feet wide, the 1982 “Untitled” canvas, featuring one of Basquiat’s trademark African-style masks floating in front of an abstracted, drip-painted background, was one of the artist’s most monumental paintings. It also had a history of making monumental auction prices.
Back in 2004, this Basquiat was bought for a then-imposing $4.5 million by the New York collector and dealer Adam Lindemann, who sold the painting at auction in 2016 for a then-record $57.3 million to the Japanese online retail billionaire Yusaku Maezawa. That record was obliterated the following year, when Maezawa paid $110.5 million for one of Basquiat’s coveted large-scale skull paintings, also dating from 1982. That price, the highest ever paid at auction for a work by an American artist, was beaten last week, when the 1964 silk-screen “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn,” by Basquiat’s friend and mentor Warhol, sold for $195 million at Christie’s.
“Basquiat connotes cool kids, misfits, the unhinged genius,” said Andrew Terner, a private dealer and collector who lent a painting to a 2019 exhibition, “Basquiat’s ‘Defacement’: The Untold Story,” at the Guggenheim in New York. “Basquiat is not just an artist; for a lot of the people out there, he’s a religion.”
Basquiat produced close to 1,500 paintings in eight years. “The levels of excellence were phenomenal in so many different areas,” said Tony Shafrazi, the New York dealer who in 1985 held a famed exhibition of collaborative paintings by Basquiat and Warhol, advertised with a poster of the two artists photographed as sparring boxers. But he recalled that the “Untitled” artwork had been among a group of 17 Basquiat paintings, priced at a total of $1.5 million, that he couldn’t sell to collectors in 1991. “I won’t tell you the names,” he said.
On a night of sustained demand, one lot before the $85 million Basquiat, a rare early white “Untitled (Nets)” painting from 1959 by the ever-admired Yayoi Kusama sold, almost unnoticed, for a record for the artist: $10.5 million.
In recent years, Phillips has made a specialty out of combining investment-grade works by market staples from the past 50 years, such as Basquiat, Warhol and Kusama, with difficult-to-source pieces by rising stars.
Phillips, Christie’s and Sotheby’s all looked to jump-start their evening contemporary sales with paintings by the New York-based artist Anna Weyant, whose solo show “Loose Screw” was lauded last year at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles.
Weyant, 27, is represented by the mega-dealer Larry Gagosian, whom she is dating. Evoking the psychological complexities of being a young woman in the 21st century with the technical precision of a 17th-century Old Master, Weyant’s paintings currently top many collectors’ wish lists.
(Christie’s example sold last week for $1.5 million to an Asian bidder. Phillips’s Weyant, a meticulous still-life titled “Buffet II,” dating from 2021, took in $731,000. It had been estimated at $100,000-$150,000.)
Experts say that the current huge discrepancies between “primary market” prices in galleries and “secondary market” auction resales for works by in-demand artists have been fueled by a global influx of wealthy young collectors, particularly in Asia, who follow the careers of emerging names on Instagram but who have no way of getting to the front of dealers’ waiting lists. Bidding at a public auction gives them access to the names they want, even if it means paying what seem to be, to outsiders, irrational prices.
“There’s a new generation of collectors who can’t afford a $50 million Picasso, but who can spend $5 million on a young artist they think will stand the test of time,” said Wendy Cromwell, a New York-based art adviser. Cromwell added that she had bought Weyant paintings from other galleries for less than $30,000, before the artist’s representation with Blum & Poe.
Social media being the echo chamber it is, would-be auction buyers tend to pursue the same names of the moment. Phillips, like Christie’s and Sotheby’s, also included hard-to-source works by Shara Hughes, Matthew Wong and María Berrío. “The Not Dark Dark Spots,” a typically dreamlike landscapes by Hughes from 2017, took $1.6 million after seven minutes of competition. It had carried a low estimate of $300,000. An exuberant, large-scale collage by Berrío, a New York-based Colombian artist, soared to $998,000. A vision of fin-de-siècle women reclining in an interior filled with flowers and rabbits, “Burrows of the Yellow” dated from 2013 and had a low estimate of $400,000.
A newcomer to watch was the Brooklyn-based female figurative painter Robin F. Williams, who has 108,000 followers on Instagram but whose works had hitherto not sold at auction for more than $40,000.
Williams’s arresting canvas, “Nude Waiting It Out,” inspired by 1970s advertising and skillfully combining spray and freehand painting, had been priced between $20,000 and $30,000 when it was included in the solo show “Your Good Taste Is Showing” at P.P.O.W. gallery in New York in 2017. At Phillips, it sold for her high price, $328, 000, against a low estimate of $150,000.
“There is huge demand for her paintings, as she only completes 12 to 15 a year. We’ve worked very hard to place these in collections that will not resell them,” said Wendy Olsoff, co-founder of P.P.O.W., which still represents the artist, hours before Williams’s painting set its new benchmark auction price.
“The negative side of this is that all people talk about is money,” Olsoff added. “The positive side is that it brings global attention to an artist, and if they can withstand the hype, they can continue to focus on what is important.”
Phillips’s sale totaled $224.9 million, the highest in the company’s history, and all 36 lots sold.
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