Battle of the Basquiats at New York auctions: both Christie's and Sotheby's will auction important works by the Haitian-American artist who died of an overdose in 1988 at the age of just 27.
Christie's monumental Basquiat,
a 3-metre-wide triptych entitled El Gran Espectaculo (The Nile) from 1983 has an exceptional pedigree
:
it comes from the collection of the designer Valentino Garavani, who was photographed in front of the painting in 2010 for a Vanity Fair shoot in the apartment on Central Park,
but before that it had belonged to Enrico Navarra, the Parisian-New York gallerist who in the 1980s helped consolidate the fame of the writer beyond the circle of chic artists of the moment.
The estimate is 45 million dollars, about ten million more than Now's The Time at Sotheby's
, an equally monumental ode to jazz, inspired by Charlie Parker's 1945 composition of the same name.
A large-scale work executed in 1985, when the writer was at the height of his international success, comes from the collection of the financier and collector Peter Brant and will be sold on May 18 after going on tour in recent days also in Los Angeles.
The Nile was exhibited at the Whitney in 1992 and then in a 2005 Brooklyn Museum exhibition to which Valentino allegedly lent the painting shortly after he bought it at a Sotheby's auction that same year for $5.2 million.
Backed by the guarantee of a potential buyer, the triptych will be auctioned on May 15 in the halls of Rockefeller Center as coming from "an important private collection",
with part of the proceeds going to the Valentino Academy.
(HANDLE).
