After the ups and downs seen at auctions in the last few days, where experts could only wish away and confirm alternately a crisis of the art market, there are still interesting proposals and the response to current fears seems to be to not lose heart and focus the attention on important names and mind-boggling predictions. After Malevich, Degas and Munch, who achieved records last week at Sotheby’s New York auction, now it seems to be Basquiat’s turn, as after 2007 he could set a new record at Christie’s “Post-war and contemporary art” auction. The Evening Sale, to be held on 12th November in New York, will offer at auction a painting by the famous US graffiti artist who, in his art just like in his life, forged ahead achieving his objectives in a short time. Currently, the painting belongs to the collection of Lars Ulrich, founder and drummer of the band Metallica, who had bought it in 1999 after seeing it in one of the artist’s retrospectives in Vienna and has now decided to put it up for auction, after the choice of another band (U2) that last June successfully sold their Basquiat in London for about 6.4 million euros. Actually, the estimated value of the work has not been disclosed and is available only on request, but it is likely to be sold for a figure ranging between 12 and 16 million dollars, thus thrashing the record of the work “Untitled” sold in 2007 for 14.6 million dollars, equivalent to about 10,775,700 euros. 
The painting on sale at the moment, “Untitled(Boxer)”, is a mixed technique (acrylic and oil) on linen executed in 1982, which portrays a mighty boxer with both arms raised. For the “stray” artist, of Haitian-Puerto Rican origins, who left school when he was 17 preferring to form himself on the field and to gain urban experience, black is beautiful and not represented enough, therefore coloured people are often protagonists of his stories told on the walls of Manhattan, and afterwards on canvas. His preference for the Black Power is confirmed even in this work, one of the many stages in which Jean-Michel Basquiat celebrated coloured characters, in which he totally identified himself, with their epoch-making deeds: athletes and musicians such as Joe Louis and Charlie Parker who  with their talent led dark-skinned creativity to triumph, figures like him sometimes consumed by an addiction to alcohol and drugs. Redemption is the password that dominated the young artist’s figurative choices, in the attempt to ennoble the everyday life and marginalization that he experienced closely. 
The painting in question belongs to the pantheon of works dedicated to boxers immortalised by Basquiat during his short life, among which we find figures like Sugar Ray Leonard, Cassius Clay, Jersey Joe Walcott and Joe Louis, of whom not only did he admire the athletic preparation and physical strength, but mainly the determination with which their fought against racial prejudice and social injustice. This is the meaning of the boxer who is protagonist in this work, a modern-time hero whose muscles are a metaphor of inner strength and of the being that aims at changing the world with its own charismatic personality: the prominent human figure is obviously a coloured man, a dark-skinned athlete, aware of his power, who resists on a white background, who therefore resists to a still hostile environment, dominated by prejudice and obvious diversity. As Basquiat often did in his works, he delineated his own self-portrait using a puzzle of contradictions and ambiguities: he opposes against physical proportions the fragility of a skeleton which is barely visible on the dark muscular mass; the canonization of the virtuous athlete, highlighted by the aureole above his head, is contrasted with the image of a crown of thorns, symbol of an ephemeral light that hides danger and symbol of lost innocence; the raised arms and the trembling fist under the writing KO are not mere signs of victory as they recall the suffering of the crucifixion.
Untitled(Boxer) was realised in 1982 by the artist when he was only twenty-two and therefore it is an important illustration of his modus operandi during the first year of his dazzling career, of his unmistakable style, in which the figure is outlined irregularly, intermittently, and in which there are references to declared models such as Franz Kline and Cy Twombly.

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