Jean-Michel Basquiat’s market remains anything but quiet. This May, a rediscovered early painting by the artist will headline Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Auction in New York with a $10 million to $15 million estimate. The untitled 1981 work hasn’t been seen publicly in 36 years. It was acquired in 1989 and has remained tucked away in the same private collection ever since—until now.
Painted when Basquiat was just 20 years old, the five-foot-wide piece captures the heat and urgency of his breakout moment: a frenetic, mythic figure scrawled in oilstick on paper, hovering, as Jeffery Deitch once put it, between the street and the studio. It’s precisely this 1981 to 1983 period that collectors treat as a gold standard—nine of Basquiat’s ten highest auction prices were for works from those years. Sotheby’s is betting that even in a cooling market, a prime Basquiat still sells.
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They’ll need it to: The May sales arrive at a moment of hesitation in the high end of the market. Global art sales dropped 12 percent by value in 2023, and big-ticket consignments have become harder to secure. Gone are the salad days of Macklowe and Paul Allen. But Sotheby’s is betting that what it does have—works that haven’t been offered publicly in decades, and in some cases, ever—will do more than compensate.
“Because there’s less volume, you need to be more astute and bring things that are really exciting for everyone in order to get people’s attention—because people’s attention right now is very much in the news,” Grégoire Billault, Sotheby’s chairman of contemporary art, told ARTnews.
Sotheby’s believes it has done just that. The season’s contemporary offerings are anchored by three tightly held, high-profile private collections: 12 works from the estate of Barbara Gladstone, more than 40 pieces from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, and the “Im Spazio” group assembled by Daniella Luxembourg, focusing on postwar Italian and American abstraction.
“These are works that have never been seen,” Billault said. “Completely fresh to the market.”
Among the top lots: Lucio Fontana’s glitter-dusted Concetto spaziale, La Fine di Dio (1963), estimated at $12 million to $18 million; Robert Rauschenberg’s towering Combine Rigger (1961) which was once owned by Sally and Victor Ganz, at $8 million to $12 million; Frank Stella’s Adelante (1964), a metallic Running V canvas deaccessioned by SFMOMA, estimated at $10 million to $15 million; and Ed Ruscha’s sfumato-text That Was Then This Is Now (1989), estimated at $7 million to $10 million.
(SFMOMA has consigned two other works to Sotheby’s Modern evening sale: Henri Matisse’s Le Bouquet d’anémones and Alexander Calder’s Four Big Dots, though the auction house did not release the estimates for those works.)
Pablo Picasso’s Homme assis (1969), Courtesy Sotheby’s.
In the Modern Evening Auction, set for May 13, Sotheby’s will offer Pablo Picasso’s Homme assis (1969), a flamboyant musketeer portrait from the artist’s final decade, estimated at $12 million to $18 million, and Georgia O’Keeffe’s lush Leaves of a Plant (1942), painted three years after her trip to Hawaii and held in a private collection for nearly half a century, also estimated at $8 million to $12 million.
Altogether, Sotheby’s expects its two evening sales—Modern and Contemporary—to bring in between $382.9 million and $525.2 million, slightly above last May’s range of $365 million – $490.5 million. Contemporary evening offerings (including The Now sale, and the Gladstone and Luxembourg sales) are expected to bring in between $142.6 million to $206.5 million, up 16 percent from last November. The Modern Evening Sale alone carries an estimate of $240.3 million to $318.7 million—nearly triple last fall’s $92.3 million to $135 million range and a significant jump from the May 2024 forecast of $180.9 million to $250.7 million.
Still, volume across the board is down. “There’s less for sale,” Billault acknowledged. “But in terms of pricing, I see a market that’s doing actually very well.” Recent results, he added, including strong showings in London, Paris, and Hong Kong, support the idea that buyers remain engaged—provided the works are exceptional and fresh.
“This may not be the biggest season,” he said, “but just imagine being able to buy what Barbara Gladstone was collecting for forty years. Or works from the estate of Roy Lichtenstein—one of the giants of American art history. The last estate of that caliber was probably Warhol at Sotheby’s in the 1990s.”
The exhibitions for Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary sales open May 2 and run through May 15 at the house’s York Avenue galleries. Evening sales begin May 13.