?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 20,000 - $ 30,000
JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT Rome Pays Off.
Color screenprint on Saunders, 2004. 1120x43 3/4x39 3/4 inches (sheet), full margins. Printer's proof, aside from the edition of 85. Numbered "PP 3/5" in pencil, lower left. With the Gerard Basquiat signature and dated "10--19--04" in pencil, verso. Published by David DeSanctis Contemporary Art, New York. A superb impression with vibrant colors.
Basquiat (1960-1988) dove into his short but colorfully prolific career as a graffiti artist at the end of his troubled teen years, having dropped out of high school in the tenth grade and been banished from his Brooklyn family home, with spray-painted designs on buildings in lower Manhattan tagged with the pseudonym SAMO. He came to the more widespread attention of the art world after particpating in The Times Square Show in June 1980.
In late 1981, he joined the Annina Nosei gallery in SoHo, and was further represented by Larry Gagosian in Los Angeles and Bruno Bischofberger in Europe. Basquiat had a friendship with and was extraordinarily influenced by Andy Warhol during the 1980s. When Warhol died unexpectedly on February 22, 1987, Basquiat's heroin additiction became more acute and he settled into a severe depression, ultimately dying from a drug overdose at his Great Jones Street, New York, studio at the age of 27.
