NEW YORK – Achieving a record-shattering $110.5 million, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled, 1982, led the Contemporary Art Evening sale on 18 May. The price is the highest paid at auction for a work by an American artist and for any artwork created after 1980. It was Basquiat's night, with five of the artist's works realising a combined $129.3 million. Kicking off the sale was Jonas Wood’s Black Still Life, which brought $1.2 million – wildly exceeding its $250,000 low estimate. Energetic bidding ensued, with with Roy Lichtenstein’s Nude Sunbathing bringing in $24 million and Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild reaching $15.4 million. Other star lots included Cy Twombly’s Silex Scintillans ($8.3 million) and Agnes Martin’s Untitled #13 ($8.1 million), both exceeding their high estimates. 

"Tonight, Jean-Michel Basquiat entered the pantheon of artists whose works have commanded prices over $100 million, including Picasso, Giacometti, Bacon, and Warhol,” commented Grégoire Billault, Head of Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Department in New York. “This extraordinary canvas from 1982 has broken so many benchmarks – a record for any American artist at auction and for a work of art created post-1980, to name just two – but those of us lucky enough to have been in its presence will only remember it’s awesome power. To think that it was created by a virtually-unknown 21-year old is humbling. We are thrilled that it was purchased by Yusaku Maezawa for his planned museum so others will have a chance to experience its magic firsthand.” 

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1982. Sold for $110.5 million.  Purchased by Yusaku Maezawa. Auction Record for Any Work by an American Artist. Photo: Sotheby's.  

Irrefutably the most significant work by the artist to ever appear at auction, Untitled ranks among the ultimate paragons of the Jean-Michel Basquiat’s oeuvre, and is the commanding counterpart to Basquiat’s Untitled (Head) in the collection of The Broad Museum. As an indisputable masterpiece from the singular formative year of Basquiat’s meteoric career, the unveiling of Untitled marks an extraordinary moment within the legacy of Contemporary Art’s most mythic and revered figure. Built up of innumerable layers of vibrant hues and coursing rivulets of pigment, Untitled is an unparalleled example of the virtuosic ability to apply, execute, shift, and render paint upon canvas that distinguished Basquiat as an undisputed master within the vanguard of young and ambitious image-makers.

Roy Lichtenstein, Nude Sunbathing, 1995. Sold for $24 million. Photo: Sotheby's. 

Robert Rauschenberg, Rigger, 1961. Sold for $12.3 million. Photo: Sotheby's.  

Within the oeuvre of an artist whose work is unconditionally shaped and influenced by his immediate surroundings, Rigger pronounces an abstract vernacular that is exceptionally particularized to—and intimately revealing of—Robert Rauschenberg’s life in Lower Manhattan at the time of its creation. Emphatically architectural, the explicit elements which make up the present work speak to both the specifics of his downtown neighborhood and the rapid changes occurring there, the result of major urban re-development in New York in the early 1960s. In a thunderous cataclysm of gestural bravura, arresting multidimensionality, and staggeringly innovative experimentation, Rigger is a seminal example of Rauschenberg’s singular engagement with the very nature of artistic form in his celebrated Combine paintings. 

David Hockney, Building, Pershing Square, Los Angeles. Sold for $7.9 million. Photo: Sotheby's.  

A critical early landmark of David Hockney’s era-defining painted visions of Los Angeles, Building, Pershing Square, Los Angeles encapsulates the very genesis of his lifelong enchantment with the magnetic allure of Southern California. Furrthermore this work crucially displays the artist’s formative radical experimentation with various technical and compositional concerns at the beginning of his storied career. Evincing his ongoing dialogue with abstraction, Hockney’s painting is dominated by straight edges and simplified shapes—the primary image is isolated in the center of the composition, framed by a flat background and three strips of color approximating the city street that runs along the bottom of the picture.  

Mark Grotjahn, Untitled (Face 41.05), 2010. Sold for $7 million. Photo: Sotheby's.  

With a bravado that echoes the rich action paintings of Abstract Expressionist titans Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and a vectored composition that pays tribute to Futurists such as Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini, Untitled successfully integrates ineffable dynamism into a syntax of gestural expression. The radial bands of scarlet vermillion, deep phthalo blue, cadmium yellow, and viridian green explode layer by layer through the composition, setting the picture plane into undulating motion. Grotjahn juxtaposes these strong primary colors against more muted hues that he has tinted with white, grey, and other light neutrals.

Rudolf Stingel, Untitled, 2012. Sold for $6.9 million.Photo: Sotheby's.  

Upon exposure to Untitled, one is immersed in a spectacular vision of thousands of graffiti inscriptions that Rudolf Stingel has cast in eletroplated copper. Because of its reflective sheen, the gilded surface resists the gaze, like a mirror, so that one becomes aware of their presence in the face of the work. The installation comprised of expansive aluminum-coated Celotex boards that lined the gallery walls. Allowed to depart radically from traditional museum protocol, viewers were invited to imprint, scribble, and incise any kind of mark with any available material, imparting an aspect of performativity to Stingel's installation that aligns him within a greater tradition of relational aesthetics. 

 Philip Guston's Cigar boldly encapsulates the audacious innovation of the artist's celebrated late corpus of figurative paintings. Painted in 1969, Cigar is amongst the earliest iterations of Guston’s radical transformation when, after decades of acclaim as a key member of the New York School and the “high priest of the abstract expressionist painting cult,” the artist abandoned the gestural flourishes of abstracted color and interpretive freedom that had become the hallmarks of his distinctive aesthetic, replacing them with bold, stylistic, and symbolically charged figurative paintings. 

Keith Haring, Untitled, 1982. Sold for $6.5 million. Photo: Sotheby's.  

Untitled epitomizes Haring’s inimitable aptitude for conveying pulsating movement through forms distilled to their most basic, essential components. Haring’s confident hand draws bold, self-assured strokes, eschewing a pre-meditated schematic plan for spontaneous genius; never erasing or reworking, Haring’s virtuosic gestural ingenuity flows directly through his brush onto the canvas. Unmistakably charged by the explosion in the painting’s epicenter, the present work harnesses the conceptual framework of a “blast” to comment on parallel outbreaks within the cultural and political lexicon of Haring’s current day.