It’s also worth noting that the record for Basquiat at auction—$110.5 million, for Untitled (1982)—was set in 2017 by a sale to Japanese collector and billionaire entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa (that work will one day be housed in a private museum in the collector’s hometown of Chiba, Japan). Maezawa is also responsible for Basquiat’s second-highest record at auction, achieved the year before for Untitled (1982), which sold for $57 million.
The work was offered in a single-lot sale entitled “We Are All Warriors,” within Christie’s Spring Twentieth Century Season, which also includes a recently rediscovered landscape by Van Gogh. The work comes amid an economic downturn due to the pandemic, which saw global art sales down by twenty-two percent compared to 2019, according to The Art Market 2021, a report recently released by Art Basel and UBS.