A monumental work by American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat with an estimate “in excess” of $45 million will head to auction this spring. The painting, Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) (1983), will lead Sotheby’s contemporary evening auction in New York in May. Starting today, March 10th, it will be on public view at the auction house’s Breuer Building headquarters until March 15th. It will then travel to Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and London before returning to New York for the May sale.
According to Sotheby’s, the painting is one of the most significant and complex works ever painted by Basquiat. It belongs to a suite of 12 exquisite works he made that year and features his signature visual lexicon of symbols, signs, and text. These motifs, including crowns, skulls, and stars, also appear in related works from the year, such as Hollywood Africans (1983).
Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) was executed during a period of prolific output that marked his astronomical ascent from downtown street artist to mainstream figurehead. In the work, the artist reflects on his newfound fame as it relates to his identity and colonialism, and the tension between art and commerce. As the title suggests, Basquiat questions who is allowed to enter the art world. Crossed-out text, another signature of his visual language, is embedded in the work, including the phrases “Priceless Art,” “Five Cents,” and “Museum Security.”
Soon after it was made, the work was included in the 1984 Whitney Biennial, as well as the artist’s second solo show with Gagosian, in Los Angeles. Since then, the painting has appeared in almost every major exhibition of the artist’s work, including shows at the Fondation Beyeler, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, and the Brant Foundation. “This work dances between the written and the drawn,” said Lucius Elliott, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art marquee sales in New York, in a press statement. “On a monumental scale, Basquiat unites images, words, and symbols, folding them together so that the words and their meanings begin to blur and shift. There’s an immediacy from his head to his hand to the line.”
This will be the first time in more than a decade that the work appears at auction. It last sold for £9.3 million ($14.6 million) in February 2013 as the top lot of Christie’s post-war and contemporary auction in London.
Works by Basquiat have continued to command high prices whenever they appear at auction. In May of 2017, an untitled work from 1982 of a massive skull became one of the most expensive works of art ever sold at auction—and a new auction record for the artist—when it sold for $110.49 million at Sotheby’s New York.
At last week’s March auctions in London, Sotheby’s sold Thin in the Old (1986) for £4.54 million ($6.06 million).
