Sotheby’s offers Basquiat’s ‘Versus Medici’

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Versus Medici, an influential painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, will be offered by Sotheby’s at a contemporary sale in New York in May, the auction house revealed just as the sale of the Modern Renaissance in London ended on Thursday.

The unveiling of the upcoming sale of the renaissance-influenced Basquiat core piece during a live auction was an unusual marketing move, providing Sotheby’s with a large, captive audience.

Basquiat’s Versus Medici, 1982, which portrays the dominant Black figure as a “vengeful figure in art history,” will be offered in the range of $ 35 million to $ 50 million at Sotheby’s evening sale of contemporary art on May 12 in New York City. The newly created work, created after a trip to Italy in 1981, has been in the same private collection for more than 30 years.

The sale, which does not currently include a third party warranty, will mark the first visit Versus Medici at auction. The painting, a triptych on three canvases, was bought by Basque champion Stephane Janssen from Larry Gagosian in 1982 and then sold in 1990 to the current owner.

The back of Jean-Michel Basquiat Versus Medici
Sotheby’s offers Basquiat’s’ Versus Medicishows the structure of the triptych in the pictures.

Courtesy of Sotheby’s

News to be offered by Sotheby’s Versus Medici comes the same week Christie’s sold Basquiat’s Warrior, 1982, for HK $ 323.6 million ($ 41.9 million), plus fees, on sale in Hong Kong. The painting – which had previously been auctioned four times – was the most expensive Western artwork sold in Asia, according to Christie’s.

However, it was not the most expensive Basquiat ever sold. That was it Untitled, a painting with a classic Basque head created in 1982, the same year as Versus Medici. That work on Sotheby’s sales in 2018 earned $ 110.5 million.

Title Versus Medici in itself challenges the legacy of the Italian Medici family, which funded many of the great artists of the Western canon, including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Sandra Botticelli.

“Apart from being completely fresh, it’s pretty rare,” says Grégoire Billaut, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art, noting that many collectors have been interested in selling Basquiat’s works as a market for works of art that have ever-increasing prices.

The business was nurtured by a family that owned it and never planned to sell it, until, “for family reasons, they didn’t have to pull a financial move,” Billaut says, pointing out it’s time to pass it on to the next generation. Although the name of the sender is not disclosed, “it belongs to the real, great collector of the Basque Country,” he says.

Billaut says he has always nurtured the painting as a work that is “so Basquiat” because it embodies how the artist “feared nothing,” in this case, taking over the entire Italian Renaissance and “redefining the canon of art.”

According to Sotheby’s, the young Basquiat, who was only 22 at the time, “crowns himself as the heir to the artistic heritage established by the masters of the Italian Renaissance” – a bold move for the young American artist of Puerto Rican and Haitian descent.

The auction house notes a number of artistic influences in the work, including the triptych format, which reflects the tripartite altarpiece, and the “anatomical complexity of Leonardo’s early drawings”. It is also a deliberate attempt to correct the history of art by putting a black figure in the center.

Earlier at Sotheby’s, Vincent van Gogh
Scene de Rue in Montmartre, In 1887, which had been in a private collection for more than 100 years, it was sold for 13.2 million euros ($ 15.4 million) with fees – several times estimated to range between 5 and 8 million euros. It was the first time the work had been seen at auction.