$110M Basquiat Painting Comes To Brooklyn Museum

PROSPECT HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN — A Jean-Michel Basquiat painting that recently sold to a Japanese collector for $110.5 million will go on display at the Brooklyn Museum this month.

The Untitled skull painting — and the most expensive piece of art ever auctioned in the U.S. — will be the focus of a Brooklyn Museum exhibit called “One Basquiat,” opening on Jan. 26, the museum and owner announced.

“I am thrilled to be sending Basquiat’s masterpiece home to Brooklyn,” said Japanese collector Yusaku Maezawa in a statement.

“It is my hope that through the exhibition and extensive programming accompanying it, the young people of the borough will be inspired by their local hero.”

Basquiat, who painted Untitled in 1982, was born at Brooklyn Hospital, lived in Park Slope, and was enrolled a junior member of the Brooklyn Museum by his mother when he was 6-years-old.

Basquiat began his decade-long career spray-painting slogans, attributed to SAMO, across the Lower East Side in the late 1970s. His work in the Times Square Show in 1980 garnered acclaim and skyrocketed Basquiat toward international fame. Basquiat died of a drug overdose in 1988, when he was 27-years-old, and he was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery.

His work was showcased at the Brooklyn Museum with a retrospective in 2005 and the exhibit, Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks, in 2015.

Untitled will be taken on a world tour that begins in Brooklyn and will end in a museum Maezawa is building in Chiba, his hometown in Japan, according to a press release from the Brooklyn Museum.

Curator Eugenie Tsai will lead a discussion on Untitled and the One Basquiat exhibit on Feb. 3 at 6 p.m. and the museum will host a panel of artists for “A Tribute to Basquiat” at the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium on Feb, 15 at 7 p.m.

The painting will be on display in the Robert E. Blum Gallery from Jan. 26 until March 11.

Photo Caption: Jean-Michel Basquiat (American, 1960-1988).Untitled, 1982. Acrylic, spray paint, and oil stick on canvas, 72 ⅛ x 68 ⅛ in. (183.2 x 173 cm). Collection of Yusaku Maezawa. © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Licensed by Artestar,
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