It’s the week of the big spring auctions in New York, and art collectors with a little left over in their pockets from the fair weekend now turn their attention to the big three houses. Last May Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips sold $1.4 billion during this season, a 22 percent decrease from 2023. Will we see a return to form this week? Christie’s has assembled a slate of expensive works, led by Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Baby Boom (1982), for its marquee 21st Century Evening Sale on Wednesday. We caught up with Isabella Lauria, the head of that sale, to hear more about Baby Boom and some of the other works heading to the block that evening.

Basquiat’s output was wild and varied. What can you tell me about Baby Boom? What makes it special? 1982 would have been fairly early in his career, right?

Baby Boom was painted in 1982 and included in Basquiat’s renowned solo show with Fun Gallery in November of 1982. Considered by many to be the most important show of the artist’s life, it revealed a young Basquiat at age 22 with great artistic freedom beginning to pay tribute to the graffiti community. It was also where he showcased his first stretcher-bar paintings (with handmade supports), this work standing among them. Baby Boom has been interpreted as Basquiat’s family portrait. With a title in reference to the influx in birthrate following WWII, it is a triple portrait thought to portray Basquiat’s father (Gerard) at center, his mother (Matilda) to the right, and the young artist at left. It is, therefore, incredibly personal, and it is a rarity to see something so autobiographical in his oeuvre. The work has been exhibited in no less than twenty monographic shows of Basquiat’s career, across a dozen countries and four continents, with posthumous retrospectives including the Brooklyn Museum in 2005, Fondation Beyeler in 2010, Gagosian in 2013 and Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2019.

I was at the 2017 auction where a painting by Basquiat sold for $110.5 million, to audible gasps. How has the Basquiat market changed since then? 

Since 2017, Basquiat’s relevance to Contemporary culture has continued to spread, far beyond the world of fine art, into music, media and fashion. In the seven years since the above record price was achieved, he has had several major institutional retrospectives which have continued to assert his importance in the art historical canon, including “King Pleasure” in both New York and Los Angeles in 2024, two shows at Fondation Louis Vuitton (“Jean-Michel Basquiat” in 2018-2019 and “Basquiat x Warhol: Painting Four Hands” in 2023), and a further retrospective at the Brant Foundation in New York, in which this work was included.

Why is the Basquiat in the 21st Century Sale despite having been made in the 20th century? It strikes me as a tactical decision.

Christie’s 21st Century Evening Sale presents masterworks from the past 50 years of art history, in order to chart the landscape of today’s artistic culture. Celebrated blue-chip artists from the late 20th Century bring context to the emerging creators of the 21st Century, and in turn are given new life. Basquiat is a keystone of this strategy, being a late 20th-century artist who pre-cursored almost every major artistic movement we see thriving today.

Your sale also features a subsection with objects chosen by Tiqui Atencio and Ago Demirdjian. Can you tell us more about this group of work? 

The first sixteen works of the 21st Century Evening Sale, plus a grouping of around forty in the Post-War and Contemporary Day Sale, are coming from renowned collector, patron and author, Tiqui Atencio, and her husband, Ago Demirdjian. Tiqui’s collecting philosophy is encapsulated by a term she coined, “traveloguing,” whereby she links art with a particular time and place, not only to mark a moment in the couple’s lives, but also as a way of helping them understand a people and their history. As such, the collection highlights reflect their lives spent in Latin America (Herrera, Clark, Gego), New York (Hodges, Horn, Mehretu, Ruscha) and London (Brown, Hirst), all of which she collected in depth, and with extraordinary timing, acquiring top examples very early. Tiqui’s highly refined eye has resulted in her becoming a sought-after advisor to museums around the world, and together she and Ago have served on influential committees such as the International Council of the Tate Gallery in London (where she founded the Latin American Acquisitions Fund), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco. Tiqui’s passion to communicate the joy she found in art has also led to her authoring several critically acclaimed books including Could Have, Would Have, Should Have (Art/Books, 2016), which is a series of interviews with collectors, For Art’s Sake: Inside the Homes of Art Dealers (Rizzoli, 2020), and Inside the Homes of Artists: For Art’s Sake (Rizzoli, 2024).

One of the works they selected was by the late, great Carmen Herrera. Could you tell me a little about that artwork and why it might appeal to an auction buyer?

Carmen Herrera was a proponent of ‘pure’ or geometric abstraction, presenting a transatlantic dialogue within the international history of 20th-century abstraction, one that spans European Constructivism and Neoplasticism to Brazilian and Cuban Concrete art, Argentinian Madi and New York Color Field and Hard-Edge painting.​This 1965 painting, Horizontal, is an important example; it encapsulates Herrera’s mature style, consisting of crisp lines and contrasting chromatic planes, creating an infinite variety of movement, rhythm and spatial tension.​Horizontal belongs to a rare series of circular or tondo paintings executed in 1965, a format Herrera had briefly explored in the 1950s, but which she returned to in the mid-1960s with stunning chromatic effects. The present example is distinguished for its contrasting diamond shape contained within a circle and pierced horizontally along the central axis with a band of color that suggests a beam of light radiating outward.​The companion work to this, Rondo (Blue and Yellow) (1965), is held in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.​ Works from the mid-1960s are the most sought after as they reflect the full maturation of the artist’s unique approach to hard-edge or geometric abstraction.​ Horizontal was notably included in a career retrospective of Herrera at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016, a show which solidified her position in the history of 20th-century abstraction.

Your work by Simone Leigh may set a record for the artist. Does that lend a sense of excitement to potential collectors? Is it easier to pay a great deal when you know you own the most expensive one? 

What excites collectors the most is exceptional quality. Buyers want something that is best in class, which is absolutely what Sentinel IV is. It is one of the most celebrated forms in Leigh’s oeuvre, with examples currently on display in MoMA and the National Gallery.

I know one late-minute addition to the line-up is Marlene Dumas’ Miss January (1997). There’s a high estimate on that one. What makes it so special?

Miss January’s monumental scale and iconic subject matter establish the work as Dumas’ magnum opus. It triumphantly masters the female form while defiantly reclaiming the female nude from its male-centric history. Dumas’ very first known drawing, executed at age 10, was called Miss World. It showed ten idealized forms of glamour models, demonstrating her lifelong fascination with the female form under scrutiny. She returned to the subject in Miss January over thirty years later for perhaps her most ambitious work. Paintings by Dumas are already rare at auction. However, one of this quality has never come to market. There is a third-party guarantee in place, meaning the work is already selling at the artist’s new auction record. It will also be the highest price ever paid for a living female artist at auction.

Finally, the easiest question: The annual UBS/Art Basel market report saw public and private sales fall 20 percent last year. How do you feel about the art market? 

While the overall volume of supply has dropped, the quality of art coming through is still exceptional, and clients are willing to compete for those top examples. Our sale-through rates and our performance against estimates have remained steady in recent years, indicating that demand is still very strong.