Madonna, Bowie, and a $110M Basquiat - Series 476 update
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Hi , Prior to Andy Warhol's $195M auction sale in '22 and Jackson Pollock's $181M Christie's sale this past May, Jean-Michel Basquiat held the all-time auction record for an American artist: in May 2017, Untitled (1982) sold for $110,487,500 at Sotheby's New York to Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa, and only two American artists have surpassed it in the eight years since. His top hammer has climbed from $4,560 in 1984 to the current $110,487,500 mark. Made in Japan II (1982) dates to what is widely believed to be the single most important year of Basquiat's career - the same year behind many of his record-setting works, featuring different scales and subject matters. The large-scale 1982 paintings, built from layered text, anatomical drawing, and dense symbolic imagery, are the works that have defined the top of his auction market for more than a decade.*
His reported collector base reads less like an art-world roster than a list of cultural icons. Madonna, David Bowie, Elton John, and Lenny Kravitz have all owned his work, George Lucas and Mellody Hobson are among his collectors, and Yusaku Maezawa has assembled one of the largest private Basquiat holdings in the world. Basquiat's estate is represented by Gagosian. A 2018 retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris drew more than half a million visitors, followed by major surveys at the Brant Foundation in New York and the Albertina in Vienna. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, The Broad in Los Angeles, the Menil Collection in Houston, and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Each work is unique, but according to Masterworks' analysis, 96% of similar Basquiat works have appreciated when resold at auction, across 104 repeat-sale pairs from '96 to '25. Made in Japan II is available now with a total offering size of $9,435,000. Schedule your advisory call to review this opportunity and discover if art is a fit for your portfolio.
Thanks,
The Masterworks Team
M A S T E R W O R K S
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