Modern art has become a focal point for wealthy collectors and investors alike. Prices have risen decade after decade and modern art masterpieces in many cases now eclipse the master paintings which are hundreds of years old. What has changed in the last decade is that works of art are not just being purchased by wealthy individuals for a collection. The works are also not even being shown in museums or hung in the lobbies of giant corporations. These pieces of fine art are being purchased by investors, many of whom have no intention of enjoying the art and may not even know much about the artist.

Collectors Lens has been tracking the developments in modern art and collectibles. The artist Jean-Michel Basquiat is one of the modern artists whose paintings have begun selling in the tens of millions of dollars. Christie’s is now set to auction a Basquiat painting in May of 2021 from the monumental Skull series titled ‘In This Case’ from 1983. It has estimated a price of more than $50 million.

Basquiat’s trilogy of large-scale skull paintings were painted in 1981 to 1983, and this work is said to represent his final expression in the series. Christie’s refers to the piece as “the most raw and visceral and emotionally-charged of the three paintings” and notes that the skull’s single yellow eye is trained “directly out at the viewer, making it impossible to look away.”

Two other paintings by Basquiat have eclipsed the $50 million price at auction. One piece Untitled from 1982 sold for $57.3 million at Christie’s New York in May 2016.

The fractional ownership platform MasterWorks.io, which offers shares for partial ownership in fine modern art (including sales of Basquiat’s paintings), noted that Basquiat’s art has risen by 20.9% annually from the years of 2000 to 2018.

According to the Christies announcement:

Included in the ground-breaking Basquiat retrospective at Paris’s Fondation Louis Vuitton, In This Case was shown alongside his two most iconic masterworks, Untitled (1981)—held in The Broad Museum, Santa Monica—and Untitled (1982), which sold in 2017 for more than $110 million, reaching the highest price ever attained by an American artist at auction. With its blazing color, pyrotechnic vigor and explosive anatomical vision of the skull executed on an immense scale, In This Case takes its place alongside these works as a talismanic masterpiece of Basquiat’s oeuvre.