In This Case

A head that will not look away

In This Case is a single head filling a canvas more than six feet on each side: a skull set against a ruby-red background, with a blazing eye, protruding green teeth and a fractured anatomy of bones and cavities. Basquiat worked it in acrylic and oilstick on canvas.

The skull's one yellow eye stares straight out. As the specialist who led its 2021 sale put it, the eye looks "directly out at the viewer, making it impossible to look away." The art historian Robert Farris Thompson called it one of Basquiat's strongest works, "a climactic portrait of the black face that haunts painting after painting."

It is the last of three large skull canvases Basquiat painted in successive years. The first, Untitled (1981), is in the collection of the Broad museum in Los Angeles. The second, Untitled (1982), a black skull with red and yellow rivulets, set the artist's auction record in 2017. In This Case closes the trio.

Basquiat at 22

Jean-Michel Basquiat was born on December 22, 1960, in Park Slope, Brooklyn. His father, Gérard, came from Port-au-Prince, Haiti; his mother, Matilde, was a Brooklyn native of Puerto Rican roots. At age seven he was hit by a car and had his spleen removed. While he recovered, his mother gave him a copy of Gray's Anatomy, the medical textbook whose diagrams of bones and organs run through his work for the rest of his life.

His rise was fast. Starting in May 1978 he and Al Diaz wrote enigmatic street texts across lower Manhattan under the name SAMO. He showed publicly for the first time in the Times Square Show in June 1980, had his first solo show in Modena, Italy, in May 1981, and in June 1982, at 21, became the youngest artist in Documenta in Kassel, Germany.

By 1983 he was internationally known. He had met Andy Warhol on October 4, 1982, and the two later painted together. In December 1982 he moved into a studio in Venice Beach, California, set up for him by a Los Angeles dealer, and in March 1983 he showed in the Whitney Biennial. He died of a heroin overdose at his Great Jones Street home in Manhattan on August 12, 1988, at 27.

New York, 1983

The skull was Basquiat's recurring emblem: part memento mori, an image of death; part self-portrait; and part logo, a holdover from his years writing on the streets. In This Case brings all three together at monumental scale.

When the painting came to auction in 2021, its sale materials presented it as Basquiat's tribute to Michael Stewart, a young Black artist whose death after a police arrest in 1983 shook the downtown community. Stewart, 25, was arrested on September 15, 1983, at the First Avenue subway station for spray-painting graffiti, fell into a coma in custody and died on September 28. Six officers were acquitted in November 1985. Basquiat also responded to the death in a separate work, Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart).

From under $1 million to $93.1 million

In November 2002 In This Case sold at auction for $999,500. In 2007 the Italian businessman Giancarlo Giammetti, co-founder of the Valentino fashion house, bought it from a New York gallery. It hung in his Manhattan apartment above the dining table, where it was photographed for a 2013 Architectural Digest feature.

While Giammetti owned it, the painting was lent widely: to the Museo d'Arte Moderna in Lugano, Switzerland (March to June 2005), the Triennale di Milano (September 2006 to January 2007), a Basquiat exhibition at a New York gallery (February to April 2013), and the Fondation Louis Vuitton's Basquiat retrospective in Paris (October 2018 to January 2019).

In spring 2021 Giammetti consigned it, though the sale's organizers declined to confirm the seller's identity. It was previewed in Hong Kong on April 28 and in New York, with an estimate of $50 million, as the lead lot of the first evening sale its organizers had devoted to 21st-century art. On May 11, 2021, at least six bidders from New York and Hong Kong competed for it. It hammered at $81 million and sold for $93.1 million with fees to an anonymous buyer.

The price accounted for nearly half of the evening's $210.5 million total and offered an early read on demand for top-tier art as the world emerged from the pandemic. It ranks second among Basquiat's auction results, behind the 1982 Untitled skull that the Japanese collector Yusaku Maezawa bought for $110.5 million in May 2017, which set the record for an American artist at auction at the time.

How to know it

In This Case is acrylic and oilstick on canvas, 197.8 by 187.3 centimeters (77 7/8 by 73 3/4 inches): close to square but slightly taller than it is wide.

The three large skull canvases are easy to confuse. In This Case has a ruby-red ground, a single yellow eye and green teeth. Untitled (1981), at the Broad, and Untitled (1982), the 2017 record holder with its black skull and red and yellow rivulets, are both titled Untitled; In This Case is the one of the three with a named title.

The canvas has a short, documented public ownership chain: the 2002 sale, Giammetti from 2007 to 2021, and the unnamed 2021 buyer.

The numbers

Medium

Acrylic and oilstick on canvas

Dimensions

197.8 x 187.3 cm (77 7/8 x 73 3/4 in)

Catalogue raisonné

No number stated in the sources reviewed

Current owner

Private collection; the 2021 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 writing street texts in Manhattan as SAMO.

3. 1981

   Basquiat paints Untitled (1981), the first of his three large skull canvases, now at the Broad.

4. 1982

   He paints Untitled (1982), the second large skull, and in June becomes the youngest artist at Documenta.

5. 1983

   Basquiat, 22, paints In This Case, the last of the three skulls.

6. Aug 12, 1988

   Basquiat dies in Manhattan at 27.

7. Nov 2002

   In This Case sells at auction for $999,500.

8. Mar 2005

   Exhibited at the Museo d'Arte Moderna in Lugano, through June 2005.

9. Sep 2006

   Exhibited at the Triennale di Milano, through January 2007.

10. 2007

    Giancarlo Giammetti buys the painting from a New York gallery.

11. Feb 2013

    Shown in a Basquiat exhibition in New York; photographed that year in Giammetti's Manhattan dining room.

12. May 2017

    Untitled (1982) sells for $110.5 million, setting the Basquiat record.

13. Oct 2018

    Shown in the Basquiat retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, through January 2019.

14. Apr 28, 2021

    Previewed in Hong Kong ahead of its New York sale.

15. May 11, 2021

    Sells at auction in New York for $93.1 million with fees, the second-highest Basquiat price at auction.

The world in 1983

• Jan 1, 1983

  The ARPANET completes its move to TCP/IP, often counted as the start of the modern internet.

• Feb 28, 1983

  The final episode of M*A*S*H airs to one of the largest audiences in U.S. television history.

• Mar 23, 1983

  President Reagan proposes the Strategic Defense Initiative.

• May 16, 1983

  Michael Jackson debuts the moonwalk on the Motown 25 television special.

• Jun 18, 1983

  Sally Ride becomes the first American woman in space aboard Challenger.

• Sep 1, 1983

  Korean Air Lines Flight 007 is shot down; all 269 people on board are killed.

• Sep 28, 1983

  Michael Stewart dies in New York, 13 days after his arrest for writing graffiti.

• Oct 23, 1983

  Bombings of the barracks in Beirut kill 241 U.S. service members and 58 French paratroopers.

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, In This Case is number 6 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 (6 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• Basquiat's lifelong interest in anatomy goes back to a copy of Gray's Anatomy his mother gave him after he was hit by a car at age seven.
• In This Case sold for $999,500 in 2002; its 2021 price was more than 93 times that.
• For years it hung above the dining table in the Manhattan apartment of Valentino co-founder Giancarlo Giammetti.
• It is the only one of Basquiat's three large skull canvases of 1981 to 1983 that has a title; the other two are both called Untitled.
• At least six bidders from New York and Hong Kong competed for it in 2021.
• Its sale alone made up nearly half of that evening's $210.5 million total.