(by Alessandra Baldini) (ANSA) - NEW YORK, MARCH 30 - Jean Michel Basquiat challenges iMedici and the Italian Renaissance in an exceptional canvas at Sotheby's auction on May 12: "Versus Medici" is the title of the painting completed by the enfant prodige of Street Art in 1982, the same year as "Untitled", the monumental skull bought in 2018 for 110.5 million dollars by the Japanese billionaire Yasuku Maezawa.
With many of the elements of Basquiat's artistic language - the crown symbol of royalty, heroism and black subjectivity in Western art, the noose of the lynched - the painting confronts the Italian Renaissance "by declaring war on the history of art but also crowning the author as a legitimate successor. masters such as Michelangelo, Leonardo and Botticelli ", says Sotheby's which valued the work between 35 and 50 million dollars.
Revolutionary artist and darling of the rich, Basquiat, who as a boy frequented museums such as the Metropolitan and the Brooklyn Museum, had come into contact with Italian art before and during his first solo show, in 1981 at the Emilio Mazzoli Art Gallery in Modena: a monster that anticipated the real American debut by three years, in 1984 by Mary Boone.
Basquiat was barely 22 when he created "Versus Medici", "Untitled" and other central works of his meteoric career.
The painting offered by Sotheby's is articulated as if it were a triptych: in the center for the entire length dominates a standing skeletal figure with a labyrinth of pink intestines outlined above the torso: a tribute to the interest in science of ancient masters like Leonardo, but also to familiarity of the son of immigrants from Puerto Rico and Haiti with "Gray's Anatomy", Henry Gray's classic anatomy textbook that his mother had given him when he was eight while he was recovering from a serious car accident.
Four of the five most expensive Basquiat were painted in 1982. Just a few days ago Christie's Hong Kong beat one for $ 41.8 million - a record for a Western artwork sold in Asia.
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