After the success of Sotheby's too Christie's London wins a great result for the auction of contemporary and post-war art.
Indeed Post-War & Contemporary Art made a total of 127.730.081 USD (€ 94.654.197), selling 96% of the catalog and the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) become the absolute protagonist.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, born in New York in 1960 from a Haitian father and an American mother of Puerto Rican origins and died in 1988, was one of the most important exponents of American graffiti together with Keith Haring.
Surely this work by Basquiat is truly to be considered as a true masterpiece, full of symbols, words and signs in a perfect chromatism of colors that blend perfectly with the energy of his work "haiku street graffiti".
The work was exhibited in 1983 at the artist's second solo show at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles alongside his other work Hollywood Africans (1983), currently owned by the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York.
It was later included in major retrospective exhibitions of the artist at the Beyeler Foundation in Basel and the Musée de la Ville de Paris Museum yet (Broadway Meltdown). It was originally owned by Kamran Diba, the architect of the famous Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, considered one of the largest collections of contemporary art in the world.
Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown is a work created at the height of Basquiat's artistic ability. Suffice it to recall that in 1982, Basquiat had exhibited at Documenta VII in Kassel and in 1983 he was included in the Whitney Biennial, becoming the youngest artist to having represented America in a major international exhibition of contemporary art at the age of just 22.
Despite his young age and the originality of his art, the critics unanimously recognized immediately the maturity and talent shown in his work.
Basquiat said of this period, 'I had some money. I did the best paintings ever. I was lonely and worked a lot, but I also took a lot of drugs' (JM Basquiat, quoted in C. McGuigan, 'New Money: The Marketing of an American Artist', in The New York Times Magazine, February 10, 1985, p 29).
Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) as in Hollywood Afriacans, we see Basquiat return to the same powerful compositional structure as always, where the black of the asphalt of New York City is superimposed on the intense cadmium yellow.
And this is how Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown ) captures the frenetic pace of the artist's peripatetic existence. On the other side of the surface of the canvas, Basquiat has inserted the words including Esso, asbestos, Rome, for 400 yen and Priceless Art, almost as if the artist wanted to joke with irony of the growing demand for his work and his new fortune and fame.
As the title suggests, this work becomes a physical manifestation of Basquiat's thought process, where images and ideas find a sense of urgency and immediacy on the canvas. Simple sentences alternate with complex motifs from the artist's daily life.
It is the upper part that dominates and especially the upper right part where the Comic Code stamp is embossed, a seal of approval that also appeared on all comics from the 1950s until the mid-1980s. In Basquiat's version the Comics Magazine Association logo is replaced with his monogram, his signature "crown" in an attempt perhaps both to mock the previous convention and to assert his own status with a seal of approval in this particular work. We also find other symbols, which lead back to Basquait, such as the African mask that dominates the center of the composition, and the mysterious shield as a symbol that we find at the top left.
It can be concluded by stating that Basquiat was among the few most interesting and innovative artists in New York: from street artist to prodigy artist in less than two years.
Top Lots:
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988) - MUSEUM SECURITY (BROADWAY MELTDOWN)- Price Made ($ 14,603,459)
GERHARD RICHTER (B.1932)- ABSTRACT BILD – Price Made ($ 13,202,115)
PETER DOIG (B.1959)- THE ARCHITECT'S HOME IN THE RAVINE – Price Made ($ 11,975,939)
FRANCIS BACON (1909-1992)- MAN IN BLUE VI – Price Made ($ 7,771,907)
LUCIO FOUNTAIN (1899-1968) - SPACE CONCEPT, WAITING – Price Made ($ 6,195,395)
DAVID HOCKNEY (B. 1937) – GREAT PYRAMID AT GIZA WITH BROKEN HEAD FROM THEBES – Price Made ($ 5,494,723)
PIERRE SOULAGES (B.1919)- PEINTURE 202 X 156 CM, 27 MARS 1961– Price Made ($ 5,144,387)
CHRISTOPHER WOOL (B. 1955) – MAD COW – Price Made ($ 3,567,875)
ALLEN JONES (B. 1937) – HATSTAND, TABLE AND CHAIR (I) HATSTAND (II) TABLE (III) CHAIR – Price Made ($ 3,392,707)
Damien Hirst (B. 1965) – AWAY FROM THE FLOCK (DIVIDED)- Price Realized- ($ 3,042,371)
