[ad_1]
Topline
A painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat sold for an impressive nearly $42 million at a Hong Kong auction Tuesday, surpassing the previous record for the highest auction price fetched by a Western artist in an Asian market and serving as another example of growing demand for high-priced pieces from Western artists.
Artist Jean-Michel paints in 1983 in St. Moritz, Switzerland.
Key Facts
Warrior, which shows a male figure standing upright and holding a sword, fetched a price on the lower end of the auction house’s estimate without fees.
It still easily beat out the previous most-expensive piece of Western art at an Asian auction: an abstract, drippy painting called Abstraktes Bild (649-2) by German artist Gerhard Richter that sold for roughly $27.6 million in Hong Kong last year.
Tuesday’s auction follows a particularly successful Christie’s auction in December, during which Hong Kong bidders offered sums that broke six artist price tag records for pieces from young, contemporary Western artists, which are becoming increasingly in-demand there.
The auctions show how important customers in Asia have become to the high-end Western art market, especially amid the coronavirus pandemic — while overall art sales plummeted last year, high-dollar purchases from wealthy Asian buyers held up surprisingly well, according to Art Basel’s annual report on the global art market released last week.
Key Background
Basquiat painted Warrior in 1982, widely acknowledged as one of the best years of the artist’s career. That same year, he also completed his most high-priced painting ever, Untitled, which sold for $110.5 million in 2017 to become the most expensive piece by an American artist. It was snapped up by Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa from a New York auction. According to Art News, 9 of Basquiat’s 10 most expensive paintings were completed in 1982. An artist of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent born in Brooklyn, Basquiat is a favorite of many celebrity art collectors like Jay-Z, Elton John, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ellen Degeneres.
Further Reading
What 2020’s Most Expensive Painting Says About The Art Market (Forbes)
[ad_2]