$18 M. Painting by Basquiat and Warhol Heads to Sale at Sotheby’s

An untitled 1984 painting done by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat will sell at Sotheby’s in a contemporary art evening sale this May, making it one of the top lot of that marquee auction week.

This will be the picture’s first appearance at auction since it sold, also at Sotheby’s, back in 2010 for $2.65 million. Sotheby’s has placed its estimate this time at $18 million, meaning that if it sells for that price, it will have increased in value more than sixfold.

The work is part of a famed—and polarizing—grouping of paintings that the two art stars produced collaboratively between 1984 and 1985. Basquiat was far younger than Warhol, who at that point was seen as an aging Pop artist seeking relevancy. Some accused Warhol of parasitically feeding on Basquiat’s fame with these works, which combine the former’s consumerist imagery with the latter’s skulls and graffiti-like scrawls.

But today, the Basquiat-Warhol collaborations are largely remembered fondly. An expansive show dedicated to the series appeared at Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton last year. The untitled painting heading to Sotheby’s appeared in the New York iteration of that show, at the Brant Foundation, the art space run by collector Peter Brant. 

In 2022, there was also the theatrical hit The Collaboration, which focused specifically on the years Warhol and Basquiat worked together.

Speaking of the untitled work headed to auction, Lucius Elliott, head of evening sales devoted to art of the past few decades at Sotheby’s, told ARTnews, “It really is the apex of their collaboration. By 1984, they had been working together for a year. They’d grown comfortable enough to push and pull on the canvas. Things were obliterated. Things were created. But both artists fully exist on the canvas, working in their different vernaculars of the same subject matter.”

Basquiat-Warhol paintings typically perform well at auction, even if they net prices that are far beneath the eight- and nine-figure sums regularly achieved by these artists individually. The record for one of the Basquiat-Warhol pictures is $11.3 million, achieved in May 2014 at Phillips during a contemporary art evening sale in New York.