Billionaire Yusaku Maezawa is selling a Basquiat for $70 million

When Maezawa purchased the 1982 painting, Untitled, for $57.3 million at Christie’s in New York in 2016, it was the most expensive work by Basquiat ever to sell at auction.

At the time, Maezawa claimed he was acquiring it for a private museum in his hometown, Chiba. In a statement after the purchase, he noted that “regardless of its condition or sales value, I was driven by the responsibility to acknowledge great art and the need to pass on not only the artwork itself, but also the knowledge of the artist’s culture and his way of life to future generations.”

Today, in large part because of the boom that Maezawa helped to spark, Basquiat’s market is in a very different place. “It feels like a completely new era,” says Jean-Paul Engelen, Phillips’s president of the Americas. “Today, people who made a lot of their money in the last 10 years, Basquiat is their No. 1 artist.”

Rising Market

A year after purchasing the very broad painting, Maezawa topped his own record when he purchased Basquiat’s 1982 painting of a skull set against a blue background for $110.5 million.

That’s still the highest price ever paid for a work by the artist at auction, though several recent sales have come close, most notably in May 2021, when another Basquiat painting of a skull sold for $93.1 million at Christie’s in New York. The next day, Sotheby’s New York sold yet another Basquiat for $50 million. And last fall, Christie’s sold Basquiat’s giant painting The Guilt of Gold Teeth, also made in 1982, for $40 million.

Within this context, Engelen says the $70 million price tag is within bounds, particularly because the work carries a third-party guarantee, meaning that someone has already agreed to purchase it for a minimum price. “So we have it sold,” Engelen says.

The sale at Phillips, then, will come as the latest testament to demand for work by Basquiat, who died in 1988.

“I believe that art collections are something that should always continue to grow and evolve as the owner does,” Maezawa said in a statement provided by Phillips. “I also believe that it should be shared so that it can be a part of everyone’s lives. I hope that Untitled will continue its great journey in good hands and that it will bring smiles to many people all around the world.”

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