A 1982 painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat will go on sale in Sotheby’s New York contemporary art evening sale on May 12. The painting, titled Versus Medici (1982), is expected to fetch a price of $35 million–$50 million. If the work reaches its low estimate, it will be among the most expensive works by the artist ever sold at auction.
The title of the piece references the Renaissance-era Medici family, and it has some of the signature Basquiat motifs—a full skeletal figure, a crown, anatomical drawings and scrawled phrases in the background—that are coveted by collectors.
“In Versus Medici, Basquiat melds the political and art historical as he consciously stages a reckoning with the Westernized ideal of visual culture and was intent on mastering and commandeering the accepted ‘rules’ of art history in order to break them,” Grégoire Billault, Sotheby’s New York head of contemporary art, in a statement.
The artist created the painting when he was 22 years old. The painting has been held in a private collection from 1990 and have never been seen in any auctions. Before 1990, the work was owned by the late Belgian art collector Stephane Janssen, an early promoter of the CoBrA movement, who purchased it from Larry Gagosian during a studio visit with Basquiat in 1982. It was featured in the 2017 exhibition “Intuition” at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice.