With the London sales all wrapped and Art Basel Paris kicking off earlier this week, there’s only one major art world event left on the calendar between now and Thanksgiving—and it’s a big one: the November marquee auctions.
The major auction houses have wasted no time building anticipation this fall, releasing news of key consignments. Already we know the headline lot for Sotheby’s contemporary evening sale: Crowns (Peso Neto) (1981) by Jean-Michel Basquiat, which comes with a jaw-dropping $45 million estimate.
More quietly, Sotheby’s also announced the cover lot for its “Now” sale: an untitled Kerry James Marshall painting from 2008 depicting a couple embracing at sunset. That work carries an estimate of $10 million to $15 million.
Grégoire Billault, Sotheby’s chairman of contemporary art, told ARTnews that both works are significant within the artists’ oeuvres and carry impeccable provenance.
The Basquiat, Billault explained, is from 1981—a pivotal year in the artist’s rise—and was painted on Christmas night, with the inscription on the back reading “December 25, 1981.” “It’s basically Basquiat crowning himself someone of importance in New York,” he said.
The painting debuted at Basquiat’s landmark solo show at Annina Nosei Gallery in March 1982, and later that summer at Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany. It was purchased from Nosei by a London-based collector, who then sold it to Thomas Worrell, whom Billault described as an important early collector of Basquiat’s work. José Mugrabi, of the famed art-collecting family, acquired Crowns (Peso Neto) in 2003 and sold it privately for an undisclosed sum to the current consignor in 2019.
The consignor is none other than French actor Francis Lombrail, according to a source familiar with Lombrail’s collection. Lombrail consigned Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer to Christie’s New York in 2017, where it sold for $51.8 million.
The untitled Kerry James Marshall painting on view at Sotheby’s London.
The Marshall, by contrast, has a far simpler provenance: it was purchased on the primary market by the current owner. While Sotheby’s declined to comment—per its usual policy—the work appeared in an exhibition at the Church in Sag Harbor several years ago, where the lender was listed as Neda Young. A Croatian collector, Young primarily collects work by women artists, including Joan Snyder, Agnes Martin, Cecily Brown, and Nan Goldin, among other heavy hitters. She sits on several museum boards and acquisitions committees and is known as a major arts patron in the Hamptons.
“We have been chasing that picture for a long, long time. It’s very exciting for us that we are finally being able to put it up,” Billault said.
The Marshall painting’s freshness to the market is not unusual for the artist, according to Billault, who noted that his works rarely come to auction. Even rarer, he said, is one of this caliber, referring to both the uniqueness of the composition and its larger scale.
“There’s not another version or any other [Marshall] painting with this kind of composition—between the sunset, the classic marital pose, the sweetness of the color palette, and this very tender moment between a couple,” he said. “It’s a very special picture.”
Because Marshall has had a much slower career trajectory than Basquiat, his works have more often entered institutional collections rather than private ones, Billault said.
“If you open an exhibition catalogue of Marshall’s work and look at where the great pictures are located, they’re basically all in museums,” he added. “It’s very rare to have something of importance by Marshall at auction.”
Additional reporting by Sarah Douglas.
