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From Bowie’s Basquiat to Picasso’s Café Muse: The Sale of the Season

From Bowie’s Basquiat to Picasso’s Café Muse: The Sale of the Season May 1, 2025Art Auction, New York0 Comments

Icons, Intuition, and Untouched Masterworks: Inside Phillips’ Dazzling May Auction”

By Shari Inessa

There are auctions, and then there are events that feel more like whispered conversations between history and the present — where every lot tells a story, every estimate hums with electricity, and the room itself feels perfumed with potential. On May 13th, at 432 Park Avenue, Phillips will host exactly that kind of evening.

The Modern & Contemporary Art Evening Sale is poised to be one of the season’s most magnetic affairs, gathering a glittering constellation of blue-chip names — Picasso, Basquiat, Richter, Ruscha, Judd — and presenting them not as relics, but as revelations.

Let’s step inside.

The Basquiat That Bowie Loved

Art and music collided in 1995 when David Bowie acquired Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (1984) — a radiant, graffiti-infused masterpiece painted during the artist’s brief but explosive residency in Sweden. Layered with spray paint, acrylic, collage, and political symbology, it’s as much a psychological map as it is a painting. This piece doesn’t hang — it pulses. Now, it returns to market for the first time since Bowie’s passing, carrying with it the soul of two icons.

Jean-Michel Basquiat
Untitled, 1984
Estimate: $4,500,000 – 6,500,000

Jean-Michel Basquiat
Untitled, 1985-1986
Estimate: $1,500,000 – 2,000,000

Picasso’s Café Society Reimagined

Among the top lots is Pablo Picasso’s Homme et femme à table (1902–1903), a delicate but potent portrait of the artist’s friend Angel Fernández de Soto. Rendered in his pre-Blue Period palette and touched by the smoky elegance of Parisian café life, it’s a genre scene layered with intimacy — once part of the legendary Dorrance family collection, founders of Campbell’s Soup and titans of 20th-century collecting. This is not just a drawing; it’s an inheritance of artistic intimacy.

Pablo Picasso
Homme et femme à table, 1902–1903
Estimate: $4,000,000 – 6,000,000

Gerhard Richter: Memory in Monochrome

Emotion meets experimentation in Richter’s Mann mit zwei Kindern (1966), a portrait of fellow artist and friend Sigmar Polke as a child. Held in the private collection of Blinky Palermo, the piece radiates quiet significance — a rare Photo Painting that balances realism with abstraction, intimacy with enigma. The result? A reverie in oil, sharp as a snapshot, soft as a dream.

Gerhard Richter
Mann mit zwei Kindern, 1966
Estimate: $4,000,000 – 6,000,000

Minimalism with Majesty: Donald Judd and the Optical Sublime

If minimalism is an act of precision, Donald Judd’s Untitled (1988) is its aria. A steel “stack” interlaced with luminous blue Plexiglas, it floats between sculpture and light. Judd’s language — mathematical, muscular, meditative — sings here in a new key. Also on view: a bisected copper box from 1981, as cerebral as it is sensual. These works don’t just sit in a space — they transform it.

Poetry in Red, White, and Blue: Grace Hartigan’s Fireworks on Canvas

Painted in 1959, Grace Hartigan’s The Fourth is a shout and a song — a post-war riot of color, movement, and American symbolism. Acquired by William A. M. Burden Jr., MoMA powerbroker and former U.S. Ambassador, the painting feels as current as ever — a lyrical confrontation between national myth and personal chaos.

Grace Hartigan
The Fourth, 1959
Estimate: $600,000 – 800,000

New Voices, Gold Threads, and Sculpted Light

The evening isn’t all about the established greats. Olga de Amaral’s Imagen perdida 27 (1996) — a monumental handwoven textile bathed in gold leaf — adds a sacred feminine to the mix. Charles White’s Let’s Walk Together (1953) brings realism with a radical pulse, and Yu Nishimura’s marin drive (after the rain) breathes calm into the contemporary. Then there’s James Turrell’s Ariel (2022) — not so much a sculpture as an encounter with light itself.

Olga de Amaral
Imagen perdida 27, 1996
Estimate: $300,000 – 500,000

Charles White
Let’s Walk Together, 1953
Estimate: $500,000 – 700,000

Yu Nishimura
marin drive (after the rain), 2017
Estimate: $80,000 – 120,000

David Hockney
The Twenty-Sixth V.N. Painting, 1992
Estimate: $2,500,000 – 3,500,000

Hiroshi Sugimoto
The Last Supper, 1999
Estimate: $400,000 – 600,000

More Than an Auction — A Cultural Mirror

What makes this sale exceptional isn’t just its names or provenance. It’s the curation: 90% of works are fresh to market. Nearly all haven’t been seen in public for decades. It’s a delicate collision of prestige and surprise — where past masters and future icons share a stage.

In the words of Phillips’ co-heads Jean-Paul Engelen and Robert Manley, “We’re not just offering works. We’re offering moments that haven’t been seen — and may never be seen again.”

This May, don’t just follow the market. Feel it.

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