Jean-Michel Basquiat’s early genius is once again stepping into the spotlight. This May, an untitled 1981 painting—frenetic, raw, and unseen for more than three decades—will headline Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Auction in New York. Estimated to sell for between $10 million and $15 million, the piece captures Basquiat at a pivotal moment: a 20-year-old prodigy fusing street energy with fine art ambition, just before he would permanently change the course of contemporary art.

Painted in oilstick on paper and stretching five feet wide, the work is a visceral glimpse into Basquiat’s creative eruption. His figure, mythic and frenzied, seems to hover between the grittiness of the streets and the formalism of the studio—a dynamic that came to define the golden era of his output. It’s no coincidence that nine of Basquiat’s ten highest auction prices come from works created between 1981 and 1983. Collectors know this is the period where his art, his myth, and his market collide.

Born in Brooklyn in 1960 to a Haitian father and Puerto Rican mother, Basquiat was a self-taught visionary who first made waves as a teenage graffiti artist under the tag SAMO. By the early '80s, his transition from tagging SoHo walls to hanging in SoHo galleries was meteoric. Mentored by Andy Warhol and embraced by the New York art world’s elite, Basquiat’s works tackled race, power, identity, and capitalism with a visual language that was both chaotic and deeply deliberate.

At just 22, Basquiat became the youngest artist ever to exhibit at the Whitney Biennial. His success, however, came with enormous pressure. Fame, substance abuse, and the constant tension between commercial demand and personal authenticity haunted him until his death in 1988 at just 27 years old. Today, he is regarded not just as a groundbreaking Black artist, but as a towering figure in the history of modern art—one whose influence stretches from fine art museums to hip-hop lyrics to high fashion.