Buying Basquiat

As a young artist in 1980s New York, Jean-Michel Basquiat desired nothing so much as to match Andy Warhol's success. This auction season, a quarter-century after both artists' deaths, he's coming tantalizingly close to fulfilling his wish. In May, Phillips de Pury sold an untitled 1981 painting in Basquiat's characteristic street-naïf style for a record $16.3 million, nearly $2 million more than when the

market for his work last peaked in 2007. A month later, Christie's sold a larger 1981 canvas for $20.1 million, a record it expects to break in November with a third 1981 painting that the auction house is positioning as a sort of self-portrait in the guise of Jesus Christ.

The vintage of all three pictures is no coincidence. "Basquiat reached his peak almost at the beginning of his career," says Christie's specialist Loic Gouzer. "You have this raw character who'd just slipped from the street to the art world." Within just two to three years of his breakthrough, the toxic combination of drug addiction and public adulation had all but done Basquiat in, and he finished himself off with a heroin overdose in 1988--at the age of 27--having produced approximately 1,000 paintings at a broad range of quality levels. "That's a perfect market to work within," observes market insider Richard Polsky, author of The Art Prophets. "There are enough paintings that we can deal in them, but it's fairly finite because he had a short and sweet career."

But why are prices now rising precipitously? According to Gouzer, Warhol deserves some credit, as do American masters such as Jackson Pollock. "With those artists, we're no longer talking $20 million, so even a lot of very rich people are out of the game," he explains. "When we look at what was done in America beyond those guys, Basquiat really shapes up to being numero uno. He was a great colorist, a great draftsman, and he had a great sense of scale," Gouzer adds. "I think we're going to see a $100 million Basquiat. People have this subconscious panic. People want to buy him before he becomes Pollock."

Polsky agrees that the Basquiat market still has room for growth but is wary of putting him in Pollock's or Warhol's league. "Basquiat's market is 100 percent speculative," he argues. "It's 100 percent market driven. It's not art-history driven. Basquiat is a semimyth, and he's on his way to becoming a full-blown myth."

And in that respect, at least, Basquiat has aced the Warhol test.

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