ACQUIRING Basquiat’s “Arteries of the Left Arm”, at sotheby’s
At Phillips auctioneers in November I acquired this Jean-Michel Basquiat canvas, “Arteries of the Left Arm” from 1983 for a California collector. It is very difficult to find a Basquiat on canvas at this price point and this one came with a conservative estimate for this medium at $800,000-$1,200,000.
The focus of the work is the large collaged paper element with a number of drawings and text. The word “Chops.” is written on the side of a drawing of a pig. This text, in other works, is combined with the word “pork” and is an unflattering critique of both the art market and his Italian art dealer, Annina Nosei, whom he disparagingly referred to as “the pork merchant”.
A drawing of an arterial structure appears to be almost directly from the cover of the medical encyclopedia, Gray’s Anatomy, a gift from his mother and an often referenced book in his work that Basquiat was said to have memorized when he was hospitalized as a child.
The word “coal” and the drawing of the train carried multiple meanings to the jazz artist John Coltrane, to the subway lines in New York, from the labor to produce coal, to historical trains moving commodities across America.
The train tracks themselves also sometimes doubled as teeth in Basquiat's work. Other symbols include a Basquiat’s head drawing, and a tipped down crown of thorns
Because Basquiat’s can sometimes sell either for the low or very high, I used a guarantee, a financial instrument in an auction to ensure the seller and the house they have a guaranteed sale going into the auction and a piece of the upside for my client if we are outbid.
When a lot like this opens you are buzzing a bit with anticipation because you don’t know exactly how things will play out. This time everything fell into place and the auctioneer from Phillips hammered this piece at our winning bid of $700,000. This meant with the buyers premium we bought a large Basquiat on canvas for less than $1,000,000, a rare and well-purchased acquisition.