Untitled (ELMAR)

Basquiat's golden year

In 1982 Jean-Michel Basquiat went from downtown name to international star. Born in Brooklyn in December 1960 to a Haitian father and a mother of Puerto Rican descent, he had first been known as half of the graffiti duo SAMO. His first American solo show opened at Annina Nosei's gallery in New York on March 6, 1982. In June he became one of the youngest artists ever to take part in Documenta in Kassel, Germany, and by that summer the Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger had become his worldwide dealer.

On October 4, 1982, Bischofberger brought him to lunch with Andy Warhol. "I took a Polaroid," Warhol wrote in his diary, "and he went home, and within two hours a painting was back, still wet, of him and me together." The friendship would lead to the two artists' joint paintings of 1984 and 1985.

The auction catalog for this painting says Basquiat made approximately 200 significant works on canvas that year, helped by a steady supply of large canvases from Nosei. "For Basquiat, it all converges in 1982," the dealer Jeffrey Deitch has said. "Those of us who were there at the time and saw those paintings just couldn't believe it."

The angel, the archer and the sea

At left, a birdlike "fallen angel" wears Basquiat's recurring crown of thorns, which doubles as a halo. It hovers over a bright blue sea of scribbled waves, with the word "ELMAR" written above the crest. Read as one word it looks like a name; read as two, "el mar," it is Spanish for "the sea." Basquiat spoke Spanish fluently and often worked it into his paintings.

At right stands a large warrior figure with raised arms, a bow and a flurry of arrows. His body is built from overlapping red and white paint, black oilstick and gold spray paint, with the skeleton showing through, and he is wrapped in a burst of yellow that the catalog compares to the almond-shaped halo of medieval religious art. The catalog suggests Basquiat drew on Burchard Brentjes's 1969 book African Rock Art, which he kept in his studio, and reads the scene as an Icarus story: the winged figure flying too high, the hunter waiting.

The figure's head is the only collaged element in the painting. It reproduces a motif from Basquiat's 1981 oilstick drawing Untitled (Indian Head), now in the collection of Museo Jumex in Mexico City, an image he reused in several major works.

The surface shows how fast and physically he worked. Earlier layers show through thin passages of paint, especially in the warrior's body and in the blue sea, and there are footprints on the canvas: Basquiat often painted with the canvas laid on the floor. Large areas of raw canvas are left open between the busy passages, a spaciousness the catalog links to Warhol's influence that year. Annina Nosei, who first saw the work in her SoHo gallery, called it a true "painting about painting."

The anthropologist who bought it

Francesco Pellizzi, born in 1940, was an Italian anthropologist who had studied under Claude Levi-Strauss. He co-founded and edited Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, a journal published by the Peabody Museum at Harvard and the University of Chicago Press. He began collecting in the 1960s with pieces by Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Carl Andre, and in the 1980s turned to the painters of his own circle, among them Basquiat, Francesco Clemente and George Condo. A photograph he took in 1984 shows Clemente, Warhol and Basquiat at the Pellizzi residence in New York.

He bought Untitled (ELMAR) from Annina Nosei in 1984, two years after it was painted. According to the auction house's president for the Americas, he paid $14,000 for it; another report gave the original price as $16,000. He kept it for the next four decades.

Pellizzi also wrote about his friend. In the essay "Black and White All Over," published in a 1989 catalog, he described the difficulty of pinning the paintings down: "Just when we think we have seized something essential about them, the essence evaporates. The paintings seem to slip away right and left, despite their remarkable compositional strength." He died suddenly in 2023.

Forty years in one collection, three minutes at auction

The painting was first shown publicly in 1989, in an exhibition of Pellizzi's collection at the Hofstra Museum in New York. In 1998 it was reproduced on the cover of the catalog for a Los Angeles exhibition of Basquiat's paintings and drawings from 1980 to 1988. In 2018 it was included in the Fondation Louis Vuitton's Basquiat retrospective in Paris.

In April 2024 it was announced for sale from Pellizzi's collection with two other Basquiats he had bought from Nosei: Untitled (Portrait of a Famous Ballplayer) of 1981 and Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, Amorites on Safari of 1982, the last offered separately in Hong Kong. The three were shown in New York from April 8 to 14 and in Los Angeles from April 23 to 25. With its $40 million to $60 million estimate, Untitled (ELMAR) carried the highest estimate of any single lot in that spring's New York auction week.

It sold on May 14, 2024, at an evening sale of modern and contemporary art in New York. It had a third-party guarantee. After about three minutes of bidding it went to a telephone bidder for a hammer price of $40.2 million, or $46,479,000 with fees, a figure reported in rounded form as both $46.4 million and $46.5 million. The next lot, the ballplayer portrait, brought $7,892,500, and together the two Pellizzi paintings accounted for about 65 percent of the evening's total. The buyer was not publicly identified.

Where it sits in the Basquiat market

1982 is the most sought-after year of Basquiat's career, and its top results are higher still: an untitled 1982 skull painting set the artist's auction record of $110.5 million in 2017, and another untitled 1982 canvas sold for $85 million in 2022.

Its theme of rise and fall has been read as autobiographical. The catalog ties the falling winged figure to Basquiat's sense of alienation as a Black artist in a white-dominated art world, and to his fear of losing relevance. Basquiat died of a heroin overdose in Manhattan on August 12, 1988, at 27.

The numbers

Medium

Acrylic, oilstick, spray paint and Xerox collage on canvas

Dimensions

68 x 93 1/8 in. (172.7 x 236.5 cm)

Signature

Signed "Jean-Michel Basquiat" on the reverse

Catalogue raisonne

Not stated in the sources consulted

Current owner

Private; the May 2024 buyer was not publicly identified

Timeline

1. Dec 22, 1960

   Jean-Michel Basquiat is born in Brooklyn.

2. Sep 1981

   Annina Nosei becomes Basquiat's dealer and gives him a studio in her gallery's basement.

3. Mar 6, 1982

   Basquiat's first American solo show opens at Nosei's gallery in New York.

4. 1982

   Basquiat paints Untitled (ELMAR).

5. Jun 1982

   Basquiat becomes one of the youngest artists ever shown at Documenta in Kassel.

6. Oct 4, 1982

   Basquiat meets Andy Warhol at lunch and returns within two hours with a wet double portrait.

7. 1984

   Francesco Pellizzi buys the painting from Annina Nosei.

8. Aug 12, 1988

   Basquiat dies in Manhattan at 27.

9. 1989

   First public showing, in an exhibition of Pellizzi's collection at the Hofstra Museum; Pellizzi publishes his essay "Black and White All Over."

10. 1998

    Reproduced on the cover of the catalog for a Los Angeles exhibition of Basquiat's paintings and drawings from 1980 to 1988.

11. 2018

    Included in the Basquiat retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris.

12. 2023

    Francesco Pellizzi dies suddenly.

13. Apr 2, 2024

    The sale of three Basquiats from Pellizzi's collection is announced, led by this painting at $40 million to $60 million.

14. Apr 8, 2024

    Goes on public view in New York ahead of the sale, then in Los Angeles April 23 to 25.

15. May 14, 2024

    Sold at auction in New York for $46,479,000 with fees after about three minutes of bidding.

The world in 1982

• Jan 13, 1982

  Air Florida Flight 90 crashes into the 14th Street Bridge in Washington and falls into the Potomac, killing 78 people.

• Jan 30, 1982

  Elk Cloner, the first computer virus, written by a 15-year-old, is found spreading on Apple II floppy disks.

• Apr 2, 1982

  Argentine forces take the Falkland Islands, starting the Falklands War, which ends with Argentina's surrender in June.

• Jun 11, 1982

  E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial opens in the United States and becomes the biggest box-office hit for the next 11 years.

• Jun 12, 1982

  A nuclear disarmament rally draws 750,000 people to New York's Central Park.

• Jul 11, 1982

  Italy beats West Germany 3-1 to win the World Cup in Spain.

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, Untitled (ELMAR) is number 13 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 (13 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• "ELMAR" looks like a name, but split in two it is Spanish: "el mar," the sea, written just above the painted waves.
• The warrior's head is the only collage in the painting, a motif taken from a 1981 Basquiat drawing now in a Mexico City museum.
• Basquiat often painted on canvases laid on the floor, and his footprints are visible on this one.
• Its buyer in 1984 paid $14,000, according to the auction house; 40 years later it sold for $46,479,000.
• In the year he painted it, Basquiat met Andy Warhol, who wrote that the young artist went home after lunch and came back within two hours with a still-wet portrait of the two of them.
• It was the highest-estimated single lot of the entire May 2024 New York auction week.