ProvenioArt Intelligence
Sign InExplore
polity united states reagan eraconcept:era contemporary

In This Case

Acrylic and oil stick on canvas by Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1983. A large-scale figurative work featuring a stylized skull-like head rendered in Basquiat's characteristic gestural vocabulary, with exposed anatomical elements and text. Sold at Christie's New York on 11 May 2021 for $93,100,000 — at the time a record for Basquiat at Christie's and a major post-pandemic auction benchmark.

Scholarly Significance

Anchor the Basquiat canonical cluster with In This Case (1983) — a major late-career canvas that achieved $93.1M at Christie's in May 2021, setting a post-pandemic record for Basquiat and demonstrating continued market strength into the 2020s.

Notes

  • ·Painted in 1983, a year when Basquiat's work deepened its engagement with anatomical imagery and text-mark interplay.
  • ·The title 'In This Case' introduces a rhetorical, argumentative register uncommon in Basquiat's typically aphoristic or descriptive titling, suggesting a legalistic or conditional logic that heightens the work's conceptual dimension.
  • ·The 2021 Christie's sale at $93.1M placed In This Case as the second-highest Basquiat auction result at the time (behind the 2017 Sotheby's Skull record), demonstrating sustained and growing collector demand post-pandemic.
  • ·The May 2021 Christie's Evening sale context — the first major in-person auction after COVID-19 restrictions — gave the result additional cultural weight as a signal of art market resilience.
  • ·Stylistically consistent with Basquiat's 1982–1983 peak production: large-scale, skull/head imagery, dense integration of text, anatomical diagramming, and symbolic marks.