‘Intense and Electrifying’ Basquiat Heads to Sotheby’s This May With $45m Estimate

Jean-Michel Basquiat 1960-1988, United States Follow +

A pivotal artwork by the late American neo-expressionist artist Jean-Michel Basquiat will go under the hammer for the first time in more than a decade at Sotheby’s in New York this May.

With an estimate in excess of $45 million USD, Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) is part of a suite of one dozen large-scale works executed by Basquiat in 1983 while on an extended visit to Los Angeles. It last sold at auction in 2013 at Christie’s London to an unnamed buyer for $14.6 million.

Grégoire Billault, chairman of contemporary art at Sotheby’s New York, described the painting as “intense and electrifying”. He said: “...Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) embodies the qualities that define the artist at his very best: executed at the height of his career, on an impressive scale, and charged with the imagery and language that made his work instantly recognisable.”

Rendered in his unmistakable style in oil stick and paint, the work stands at over two metres tall, with frenetic snippets of text—including the phrases “Five Cents”, “Asbestos”, “Museum Security” and “Law”—layered against swathes of dripping black, white, and tan. Its title alludes to recurring themes in Basquiat’s oeuvre, from cultural authority to race and class, as the young artist navigated his accelerating success in the New York scene.

The work has been widely exhibited internationally, including at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris for the artist’s 2018 retrospective, and at the Brant Foundation in New York in 2019, while another work from the same series, Hollywood Africans (1983), is held in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The painting is currently on public view at the Breuer in New York until Sunday. It will then travel to Hong Kong, Los Angeles, and London before returning to New York, where it will go on view once more ahead of Sotheby’s May contemporary evening auction.