Need to brighten up your living room, but don’t want to have to drive to New York City? You’re in luck, as Phillips auction house is opening a new location in Southampton, where Pottery Barn was. The space will open with an exhibition previewing the 20th century and contemporary art sales scheduled for November. One of them is Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Portrait of A-One A.K.A. King, which is estimated between $10 and $15 million. Even if your pockets aren’t deep enough for that, go take a look anyway, we say.
Edward Dolman, the chief executive for Phillips, told the New York Times about the decision to open in Southampton. “It made sense to take art that we would traditionally show solely in Manhattan out to where a lot of our clients decided that they were going to be spending much more of their time.”
We do think it’s a little amusing to see Basquiat, possibly the most urban great artist there has ever been, in Southampton. But, of course, the painting will probably wind up in Manhattan anyway. The painting depicts Basquiat’s good friend and fellow graffiti artist A-One as a king, wearing one of Basquiat’s signature three-pointed crowns in front of a tagged wall. The six foot square painting was first sold in 1986 for just $18,150 at Sotheby’s in New York, while Basquiat was still alive. In 2017, of course, Basquiat’s Untitled sold for an astonishing $110.5 million, the highest price paid at auction for a work by any American artist and for any artwork created after 1980.