How much is Jean Michel Basquiat worth?
| Net Worth: | $8 Million |
|---|---|
| Profession: | Artist |
| Date of Birth: | December 22, 1960 |
| Country: | United States of America |
| Height: | 1.84 m |
“I had some money; I did the best paintings ever.” Jean Michel Basquiat, 1982
About Jean Michel Basquiat
Basquiat had two younger sisters, Lisane, and Jeanine, as well as an elder brother, Max, who passed away just before he was born . His mother was born in Brooklyn to Puerto Rican parents, while his father was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He was brought up as a Catholic.
At the age of seven, Basquiat was struck by a car in 1968 as he played on the street. His arm was fractured, and he also sustained a number of abdominal wounds that necessitated a splenectomy. His mother gave him a copy of Gray’s Anatomy to keep him entertained while he was in the hospital.
Basquiat and his sisters were raised by their father when his parents divorced that year. His mother spent the rest of her life in and out of hospitals after being admitted to a mental hospital when he was ten years old.
As a member of the graffiti duo SAMO with Al Diaz in the late 1970s, when rap, punk, and street art came together to form the early hip-hop music scene, Basquiat first rose to recognition by creating enigmatic epigrams. His works were on display in galleries and museums all over the world by the start of the 1980s. At age 21, Basquiat made history by participating at documenta in Kassel as the youngest artist ever. He was one of the youngest artists to display at the Whitney Biennial in New York at the age of 22.
Basquiat made an appearance on Glenn O’Brien’s live public access television program TV Party in 1979.
Basquiat and O’Brien became friends, and during the following few years, he frequently appeared on the program. He eventually started spending time around the School of Visual Arts creating graffiti, where he became friends with classmates John Sex, Kenny Scharf, and Keith Haring.
Following their collaboration on the Downtown 81 film, Debbie Harry, the lead singer of the punk rock band Blondie, purchased Cadillac Moon (1981), Basquiat’s debut painting, for $200.
In the 1981 Blondie song video “Rapture,” he also played a disc jockey, a role that was initially written for Grandmaster Flash. At the time, Basquiat shared a residence with his lover Suzanne Mallouk, who worked as a waitress to support him financially.
Midway through the 1980s, Basquiat was making $1.4 million a year and getting one-time payments from art dealers of $40,000.
Gallerist Emilio Mazzoli, on the advice of Italian artist Sandro Chia, paid $10,000 for ten of Basquiat’s pieces and mounted an exhibition in May 1981 at his gallery in Modena. By 1982, which is regarded as his most significant year, his work was greatly in demand due to the Neo-expressionism art boom. Most of his best-selling paintings at auction from that year are from 1982.
In 1984, it was stated that the value of his creations had increased by 500% in just two years. Midway through the 1980s, Basquiat was making $1.4 million as an artist annually. His paintings were fetching between $10,000 and $25,000 each by 1985. A young African-American artist had never appeared on the cover of The New York Times Magazine before Basquiat’s ascent to stardom in the global art market in 1985.
At the height of the art market boom, the global auction volume for his work was over $115 million. Up until 2002, Self-Portrait (1982), which sold at Christie’s in 1998 for $3.3 million, was the most money ever spent on an original Basquiat piece. Drummer Lars Ulrich of the heavy metal band Metallica sold Basquiat’s Profit I (1982) at Christie’s in 2002 for $5.5 million. Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, which was released in 2004, included a documentary about the auction’s processes.
Federal officials seized Basquiat’s 1982 painting Hannibal in 2007 as part of an embezzlement scam run by former banker and convicted Brazilian money launderer Edemar Cid Ferreira.
When Ferreira was in charge of Brazil’s Banco Santos, he used money that had been obtained illegally to buy the painting. It was delivered from the Netherlands to a warehouse in Manhattan with a fictitious shipping statement saying that it was worth $100. Later, the picture was sold for $13.1 million at Sotheby’s.
The cost of Basquiat’s artwork rapidly rose from 2007 to 2012, reaching a high of $16.3 million.
The $20.1 million sale of Untitled (1981) in 2012 propelled his market to new heights. Dustheads (1982) sold at Christie’s for $48.8 million in 2013. The painting that features a figure resembling the devil, was bought by Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa for $57.3 million at Christie’s in 2017. In 2022, he sold the painting to Phillips for $85 million. In May 2017, Maezawa also paid a record-breaking $110.5 million for a Basquiat.
Flexible (1984), was sold for $45.3 million in 2018, was Basquiat’s first piece created after 1983 to sell for more than $20 million.
Untitled (Head) (1982), sold for $15.2 million in 2020, which set records for both a Sotheby’s online sale and a Basquiat work on paper. An unidentified artwork on paper sold for $10.8 million in July 2020. American entrepreneur Ken Griffin paid art collector Peter Brant paid over $100 million for the 1982 painting Boy and Dog in a Johnnypump. The most expensive Western work of art to be sold at auction in Asia was Basquiat’s Warrior (1982), which fetched $41.8 million at Christie’s in Hong Kong in 2021.
In This Case (1983), a painting by Basquiat, sold at Christie’s in New York in May 2021 for $93.1 million. Later that year, at Christie’s in Hong Kong, his painting Donut Revenge (1982) sold for $20.9 million.
