Exquisite Works By Brice Marden And Jean-Michel Basquiat Expected To Fetch $50 Million And $30-Plus Million, Respectively, At Christie’s

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s boyhood wonder sails alongside his innovative creative prowess, as the viewer takes a fierce punch of symbols, motifs, colors, and lexicon.

“This is an incredibly busy painting and an incredibly balanced painting. Symbols-wise imagery-wise you really have everything you look for with Basquiat. You have multiple crowns in the composition, the anatomical drawings, you have obviously the title and references to comic books, you have the repetition of the words and the scratching out those words,” Isabella Lauria, Christie’s vice president, senior specialist, and head of the 21st Century Evening Sale, said today during a walkthrough of the New York galleries. “Another thing to really note is Basquiat has painted underneath this very turquoise base to the actual composition and it does, depending on the lighting, it does kind of change the actual coloring of the work on top. This painting is also in pristine condition. This is something that is very rare for these pictures.”

The Italian Version of Popeye has no Pork in his Diet (1982), a meticulous example of Basquiat’s signature stretcher-bar paintings, is expected to fetch in excess of $30 million when it goes on the block in 11 days. The five-foot-square acrylic, oilstick, and paper collage on canvas mounted on tied wood supports, painted when the artist was 21 years old, also celebrates Black athletes, musicians, and Civil Rights leaders, alongside the salty, pugnacious titular character. The painting was last seen in public at the groundbreaking Whitney Museum of American Art retrospective in 1992, examining the conflicts of wealth and poverty, integration and segregation, and inner versus outer experience.

Energy swirls differently in Brice Marden’s monumental masterpiece Event (2004-2007) from the artist’s seminal Summation series to convey a culmination of the ideas and processes mastered over his career, which ended with his death last year. Expected to sell for between $30 million and $50 million on May 14, the eight-foot-wide, six-foot-long oil on linen in two parts layers painstakingly layers pigments based on the prismatic spectrum.

“Brice has spent his entire career and life as an artist traveling, and being inspired from places as far reaching as moss gardens in Kyoto, (Japan), to the beautiful beaches of Haifa, (Israel), but here's his dock in New York sort of where we began. He's obviously thinking about how you speak, and about line, and he’s putting it all on canvas. What is amazing about this painting is that we feel the struggle and the tension, but we also feel this incredible sense of calmness. Brice is all about color, and the way in which he layers color and thinks about color hits each of us differently on a very guttural level,” said Sara Friedlander, deputy chairwoman of Post-War and Contemporary Art.

Color continues to dazzle us as we step back into the previous century and turn our gaze to one of a series of nine 82-inch Andy Warhol Flowers painted in 1964, featuring three indo orange hibiscus blooms and a fourth erupting in cadmium red against an exuberant green background, all all rendered in Day-Glo paint. This rare work, inspired by a photograph shot by Modern Photography magazine Patricia Caulfield as an illustration for a new Kodak color processor, is expected to sell for between $20 million and $30 million at the 20th Century Evening Sale on May 16.

The Flowers “were created because Henry Geldzahler, the famed (art historian and) curator was encouraging Warhol to abandon the darkness of the Death and Disaster series … and suggested he look at a book of photography where he found the source’” said Emily Kaplan, senior vice president, senior specialist, and Co-Head of 20th Century Evening Sale.”In 1964, Warhol did his first show with his new dealer, Leo Castelli, and in that show, he chose three of those nine paintings in the 82-by-82-inch format, this being one of them. This is really the best of the best for Warhol and for the Flowers series. … If you look up close, you can really see the hand of the artist and the mark in a way that his later works, even the later Flowers simply do not, when he sort of removed the hand of the artist and the variability of that.”

Along with The Rosa de la Cruz Collection Evening Sale on May 14, which brings to the forefront artists, such as Ana Mendieta, who have been under-recognized, the New York galleries are showcasing an array of art historical triumphs.

“Christie's prides itself, and I pride myself, and we pride ourselves, to be the house of collections. Well, there aren't very many collections this season. The collections that there are we took and we got,” said Alex Rotter, chairman of Christie's 20/21 Art Departments. “It is different than it used to be in recent years, where the mega collections came in and take up all the space, intellectually, emotionally, and financially. So we had a very different task this season. We had a task to endure, to fill out the sale, or not just fill out the sale, but find certain pillars for the sale, which we specifically did. This was one of the sales seasons that was more proactive than most other seasons. In a very frothy market, the things just come in and the market takes on its own individuality and makes itself up. When the times are a little bit more peculiar, more precise, more specific, the expertise is much more in demand. And we went out and thought ‘what are the paintings, what are the works of art that fit?’ Certain criteria fit the greater criteria of being relevant at this moment, whatever this may be. Fitting the criteria of being the highest quality of what it is.”