Jean-Michel Basquiat

Life and work

Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American painter born in 1960 in Brooklyn, New York, and active until his death in 1988. He began as a graffiti writer under the tag SAMO in downtown Manhattan in the late 1970s before moving into painting in the early 1980s. Working across canvas, wood panels, doors and other found surfaces, he combined text, anatomical diagrams, maps and figures drawn from Black history, jazz and street culture into dense, layered compositions. By the middle of the decade he was showing internationally and had entered a working friendship with Andy Warhol that produced a body of joint paintings. Basquiat died in 1988 at the age of twenty seven, leaving behind a large body of paintings, drawings and prints that auction houses, museums and scholars have continued to study and place in context in the years since.

Disciplines in the saleroom

Basquiat's market divides clearly by medium. Unique paintings on canvas and panel command the highest prices and anchor evening sales at the major international houses, followed by works on paper and drawings, which trade in a separate and more accessible tier. A third tier is made up of posthumous print editions issued under the estate, such as screenprints published in runs of dozens of impressions rather than as unique objects. LLB Auction's own sale of a Basquiat lot sits within this same spread of media, and for any consignment the support, whether canvas, panel, paper or print, is the first fact a specialist records before anything else is examined.

What a specialist examines

A specialist starts with the support itself, since Basquiat painted on canvas, wood panel, doors and other salvaged material, each with a different condition profile and a different set of known issues. Signature placement, inscriptions and any date written on the verso are compared against patterns documented for the relevant period, and the paint layer is read for the combinations of oilstick, acrylic and spray paint typical of his working method. Provenance is traced back toward the dealers active around the artist in the early 1980s and toward any exhibition that places the work in a documented show, ideally one drawn from the exhibitions listed under Career. Edition number, publisher and any estate stamp are recorded for a print. Because the body listed under Career no longer takes new submissions, current practice leans more heavily on this documentary trail than it once did.

Market position

Basquiat's paintings continue to anchor major evening sales. Untitled brought $85,000,000 at Phillips in New York in 2022, coming from the same 1982 series that also produced Untitled (ELMAR), which brought $46,479,000 at Phillips in 2024. Flexible, a panel painted on a section of picket fence, brought $45,315,000 at Phillips in 2018, and Zenith, the 1985 collaboration with Andy Warhol, brought $11,365,000 at Phillips in 2014. At a different scale, the screenprint Untitled (Charles the First) brought £9,600 at Bonhams in 2008, a figure that shows how far a published edition sits from a unique painting or panel in this market.

What a seller should have ready

A seller should assemble the invoice or bill of sale and any earlier gallery or auction paperwork before approaching a house. Clear photographs of the front, the verso, the signature and any inscriptions help a specialist form a first opinion. Exhibition history, publication references and any conservation or framing records add weight to a submission, as does a written note of exact medium, support and dimensions. For a print, the edition number, publisher and any estate stamp should be recorded alongside the paperwork. A current condition report completes the file a specialist needs before advising on a sale.