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

Jean-Michel Basquiat's childhood wonder sails alongside his innovative creative ability as the viewer takes in a ferocious punch of symbols, motifs, colors and lexicon.

“This is an incredibly busy painting and an incredibly balanced painting. In terms of symbol imagery, you really have everything you're looking for with Basquiat. You have multiple crowns in the composition, the anatomical drawings, you obviously have the title and the references to comics, you have the repetition of words and the crossing out of those words,” Isabella Lauria, vice president, senior specialist and head of Christie's. of the 21st Century Evening Sale, he said today during a tour of New York galleries. “Another thing to note is that Basquiat has painted underneath this very turquoise base with the actual composition and depending on the lighting changes the actual color of the work on top. This painting is also in perfect condition. This is a very rare thing for these pictures.”

The Italian version of Popeye has no pork in his diet (1982), a painstaking example of Basquiat's bunk paintings, is expected to fetch more than $30 million when it hits the block in 11 days. The five-foot-square acrylic, oil, and paper collage on canvas mounted on tied wooden supports, painted when the artist was 21, also celebrates black athletes, musicians, and civil rights leaders, along with the salty title character and combative The painting was last seen in public in the Whitney Museum of American Art's groundbreaking retrospective in 1992, examining the conflicts of wealth and poverty, integration and segregation, and the inside versus outside experience.

The energy spins differently in Brice Marden's monumental masterpiece event (2004-2007) of the seminal of the artist summation series to convey the culmination of ideas and processes mastered throughout his career, which ended with his death last year. Expected to sell for $30 million to $50 million on May 14, the eight-foot-wide, six-foot-long oil on linen in two parts painstakingly layered pigments based on the prismatic spectrum.

“Brice has spent his entire career and life as an artist traveling and drawing inspiration from places as far away as the moss gardens in Kyoto, (Japan) to the beautiful beaches of Haifa, (Israel), but here his wharf in new york kind of where we started he's obviously thinking about how you talk and he puts it all on a canvas what's amazing about that we feel the struggle and the tension, but we also feel this incredible sense of calm. Brice is all about color, and the way he layers color and thinks about color affects each of us differently on a very guttural level,” said Sara Friedlander , vice president of Postwar 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 Andy Warhol 82 inches. flowers painted in 1964, with three indo-orange hibiscus flowers and a fourth erupting cadmium red on a lush green background, all rendered in Day-Glo paint. This rare work, inspired by a photograph taken by Modern Photography Patricia Caulfield magazine as an illustration of a new Kodak color processor is expected to sell for $20 million to $30 million at the 20th Century Night Sale on May 16.

The flowers “they were created because Henry Geldzahler, the famous (art historian and) curator, was encouraging Warhol to leave the darkness of Death and disaster series … and suggested he look at a photography book where he found the source,” said Emily Kaplan, senior vice president, senior specialist and co-head of the 20th Century Evening Sale. “In 1964, Warhol made his first show with his new dealer, Leo Castelli, and at that show he chose three of those nine paintings in the 82 by 82 inch format, this being one of them. This is truly the best of the best for Warhol and for flowers series … If you look closely, you can really see the artist's hand and mark in a way that his later works, even the later ones. flowers just don't, when he took the artist's hand out and the variability of it.”

Along with the Rosa de la Cruz collection night sale on May 14, which brings to the fore little-known artists like Ana Mendieta, New York galleries are showing a series of art-historical triumphs.

“Christie's is proud to be the home of collections, and I, and we are proud, to be the home of collections. Well, there aren't many collections this season. The collections that are there we took them and got them,” said Alex Rotter, chairman of Christie's 20/21 art departments. “It's different than it was in years past, where the mega collections they entered and occupied all the space, intellectually, emotionally and financially. So this season we had a very different task to hold, to fill the sale, or not only to fill the sale, but to find certain pillars to on 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, things just come in and the market takes on its own individuality and is done. When the times are a little more peculiar, more specific, the experience is much more in demand. And we went out and thought 'which are the paintings, which are the works of art?' Some criteria fit the larger criteria of being relevant at the moment, whatever that is. Fit the criteria of being the highest quality of what it is.”