Crowns (Peso Neto)

The year Basquiat came in from the street

Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in Park Slope, Brooklyn, on December 22, 1960. His father was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; his mother was born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents. In the late 1970s he became known around Lower Manhattan as half of SAMO, the graffiti duo he formed with his schoolmate Al Diaz, spray-painting satirical slogans on buildings from May 1978.

1981 turned that notoriety into a career. In February he was a standout of New York/New Wave, a survey of the downtown art and music scenes curated by Diego Cortez at P.S.1. The show brought him to the attention of the Italian dealer Emilio Mazzoli, who gave him his first solo show, in Modena that May, and of the New York dealer Annina Nosei. By September Nosei had become his primary dealer and gave him his first dedicated studio: the basement of her gallery at 100 Prince Street in SoHo.

In December, Artforum published "The Radiant Child," Rene Ricard's essay on New York's graffiti-rooted painters and the first extended article on Basquiat. Ricard compared him to Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet. The curator and dealer Jeffrey Deitch later called 1981 "the year of transition between the street and the studio": Basquiat went from painting city walls, to painting discarded objects and drawing on typing paper, to painting on canvas in a studio of his own.

A Christmas painting with a price tag

Basquiat finished the canvas on Christmas Day 1981, three days after his 21st birthday, and wrote the date across the bottom: "DEC 25 81 JEAN MICHEL." At the lower left he added "PESO NETO," Spanish for "net weight," the kind of phrase printed on grocery packaging all over the neighborhoods he knew. Spanish came to him from his Puerto Rican mother, and the 2025 auction catalog reads the words as a deliberate joke on the painting as merchandise, written just as his art was starting to sell.

The composition is built around four skeletal heads with hollow eyes. Three wear crowns; the fourth wears a crown of thorns. The catalog reads the scene as Basquiat's dark version of the Adoration of the Magi, the three kings bringing gifts to the newborn Christ, with one gift possibly the yellow rectangle of a gold bar, and with the artist placing his own name beside the date of Christ's birth. That is an interpretation, not something Basquiat wrote down.

The crown was already part of his vocabulary from the SAMO years, and this is among its earliest appearances in his paintings. Around the heads, especially in a dominant white field on the left, are other signs he would reuse for the rest of his career: letters, tally marks, feathered arrows, crescent moons and tic-tac-toe grids, many adapted from Henry Dreyfuss's Symbol Sourcebook. Splashes of red, yellow and blue crowd the top.

The materials record the move from street to studio. The canvas and the bright colors reflect his new access to good supplies, while the pasted paper collage recalls the photocopied pieces he once sold on the street. Along the left and bottom edges the paint falls away to the raw tan canvas, which gives the picture the look of a worn map or an old wall.

From Nosei's gallery to Kassel and back

The painting was first shown in Basquiat's first American solo exhibition, at Annina Nosei's gallery in New York. A biography of the artist dates that show March 6 to April 1, 1982, and the auction catalog gives March to April 1982; one report on the 2025 sale places the show in 1981. Reviewing it in Artforum's Summer 1982 issue, Jeanne Silverthorne referred to the picture as "Peso Neto." In April 1982 a private collector bought it from the gallery.

That June it went to Kassel, West Germany, for Documenta 7, one of five Basquiat paintings in the exhibition. Basquiat, at 21, was among the youngest artists ever to take part, showing alongside Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol.

Its later ownership is recorded in the auction catalog. It passed through Jeffrey Deitch to Mr. and Mrs. Thomas E. Worrell Jr. of Virginia by 1992, the year it hung in Basquiat's first retrospective, which opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art and traveled to the Menil Collection in Houston, the Des Moines Art Center and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. It went back through Deitch to a private collector in December 2005, and in October 2016 to the owner who sold it in 2025. Before the sale the auction specialist said it had been held in three private collections over four decades; the catalog's provenance lists more owners than that.

Along the way it appeared in nearly every major Basquiat survey: the Brooklyn Museum retrospective of 2005, which traveled to Los Angeles and Houston; a 2006 New York show devoted to his 1981 work, "The Studio of the Street"; the 2010 retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel and the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; a 2013 exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and the Fondation Louis Vuitton's Paris retrospective of 2018 to 2019.

Five minutes in New York

The painting came to auction for the first time on November 18, 2025, in a contemporary evening sale in New York, offered as property from a European collection. It carried an estimate of $35 million to $45 million, which one report called the highest estimate ever given to a work from that formative period of Basquiat's career, and it was backed by a guarantee and irrevocable bids.

Bidding lasted about five minutes. A specialist bidding for a client on the telephone won it at a hammer price of $41.5 million, or $48.3 million with fees. It was the top lot of a sale that totaled $178.5 million. The buyer was not named.

The price sits below the artist's very top results. Basquiat's auction record was set in 2017 by an untitled 1982 skull painting, reported at $110.4 million in one account and $110.5 million in another, and paintings from 1982 and 1983 have since sold for $67.1 million, $85 million and $93.1 million.

A self-portrait as king and martyr

Writers have returned to this painting for more than four decades. bell hooks discussed it in "Altars of Sacrifice: Re-membering Basquiat" in Art in America in 1993 and in two later books, and it appears in studies of Puerto Rican and diaspora culture, in the jazz-and-art anthology The Hearing Eye, and in a 2025 collection of writings by the curator Okwui Enwezor. It is catalogued as number 7 in volume II of the 1996 second edition of the Basquiat catalogue raisonne by Richard D. Marshall and Jean-Louis Prat.

Many of the motifs that crowd this canvas, the Black figures, the heavy crowns, the hollow-eyed heads, later settled into a nearly fixed vocabulary in Basquiat's work. Here they appear early, before the market had shaped him. "There's no price or speculation yet," the auction specialist said before the 2025 sale. "It's completely him." Basquiat died of a heroin overdose in Manhattan on August 12, 1988, at 27.

The numbers

Medium

Acrylic, oilstick and paper collage on canvas

Dimensions

76 1/4 x 94 1/4 in. (193.6 x 239.4 cm)

Catalogue raisonne

Marshall and Prat, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 2nd ed. (1996), Vol. II, no. 7

Inscription

Signed, titled and dated "DEC 25 81" on the lower edge

Current owner

Private; the November 2025 buyer was not named

Timeline

1. Dec 22, 1960

   Jean-Michel Basquiat is born in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

2. May 1978

   Basquiat and Al Diaz begin spray-painting SAMO slogans on buildings in Lower Manhattan.

3. Feb 1981

   Basquiat's work is a standout of New York/New Wave at P.S.1.

4. May 1981

   First solo show, at Emilio Mazzoli's gallery in Modena, Italy.

5. Sep 1981

   Annina Nosei becomes his primary dealer and gives him a studio in her gallery's basement at 100 Prince Street.

6. Dec 1981

   Artforum publishes Rene Ricard's "The Radiant Child."

7. Dec 25, 1981

   Basquiat paints and dates Crowns (Peso Neto), three days after his 21st birthday.

8. Mar 6, 1982

   His first American solo show opens at Nosei's gallery in New York, where the painting is shown.

9. Apr 1982

   A private collector buys the painting from the gallery.

10. Jun 1982

    Shown at Documenta 7 in Kassel, one of five Basquiat paintings there.

11. Aug 12, 1988

    Basquiat dies in Manhattan at 27.

12. Oct 1992

    Included in Basquiat's first retrospective, at the Whitney Museum of American Art; by now owned by Mr. and Mrs. Thomas E. Worrell Jr.

13. Mar 2005

    Shown in the Brooklyn Museum retrospective, which travels to Los Angeles and Houston.

14. Dec 2005

    Acquired through Jeffrey Deitch by a private collector.

15. May 2006

    Shown in "Jean-Michel Basquiat 1981: The Studio of the Street" in New York.

16. May 2010

    Shown in the retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, which travels to Paris.

17. Oct 2016

    Acquired by the owner who would sell it in 2025.

18. Oct 2018

    Shown in the Fondation Louis Vuitton retrospective in Paris.

19. Nov 18, 2025

    Sold at auction in New York for $48.3 million with fees, its first time at auction.

The world in 1981

• Jan 20, 1981

  Ronald Reagan is sworn in as president; minutes later Iran releases the 52 American hostages held for 444 days.

• Apr 12, 1981

  Space Shuttle Columbia launches on STS-1, the first shuttle mission.

• Jun 5, 1981

  The CDC reports five cases of a rare pneumonia in Los Angeles, the first recognized cases of AIDS.

• Aug 1, 1981

  MTV launches on cable television.

• Aug 12, 1981

  IBM releases the original IBM PC at a base price of $1,565.

• Sep 10, 1981

  Picasso's Guernica, which Basquiat later said was his favorite thing to see as a kid, is moved from New York to Madrid.

• Sep 19, 1981

  Simon & Garfunkel play a free concert in Central Park for about half a million people.

• Dec 11, 1981

  Muhammad Ali loses to Trevor Berbick in what proves to be his last fight.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, Crowns (Peso Neto) is number 12 of 100 in the art entries of the FLOAT 100. 88 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (12 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• "Peso neto" is Spanish for "net weight," the label on packaged goods. Basquiat put it on a painting made just as his work began to sell.
• He painted it on Christmas Day, three days after his 21st birthday, in a studio in the basement of his dealer's SoHo gallery.
• At Documenta 7 in 1982 it hung in the same exhibition as works by Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol, and Basquiat was among the youngest artists ever to take part.
• Many critics and catalogs have called it simply "Peso Neto"; a 2013 New York exhibition catalog spelled it "Peso Netto."
• It had never been offered at auction until November 2025, and the bidding took about five minutes.