Jean-Michel Basquiat painting "Minor Success" 1980 NYC
Jean-Michel Basquiat painting FOUND at Lebron James House
"Just goes to show you… Art is worth whatever to someone who admires it,"
However, the King is capable of things fans may not expect from him. So when an expensive Basquiat work was spotted in his and Savannah James' house, it became a topic of conversation for fans online. The painting was sold at Sotheby's for £2,253,500 in 2020, which amounts to just over $3,000,000.
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The Jean-Michel Basquiat painting located at NBA star LeBron James' house is titled Minor Success. [1, 2]
LeBron and his wife, Savannah James, publicly revealed the artwork during a Vogue "Objects of Affection" video tour of their Los Angeles home. [1, 2]
Key Details About the Painting:
- The Creation: Basquiat created the piece in 1980 when he was just 19 or 20 years old and breaking into the New York underground art scene. [1, 2]
- The Medium: Because he lacked the resources for traditional canvas at the time, he painted it using oil, acrylic, ink, and gold paint on discarded street materials, specifically an old window frame, wood panel, and mirrored door. [1, 2, 3]
- The Imagery: The piece features a stacked layout of a car, a mask-like human head, sequences of the letter "A" (a tribute to baseball legend Hank Aaron), and Basquiat’s signature three-pointed crown motif. LeBron noted that this is one of the earliest works where the artist began using the iconic crown symbol. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
- The Value: LeBron anonymously purchased the piece at a Sotheby's auction in London in October 2020 for £2,253,500 (approximately $2.9 million to $3 million). During the home tour, the family called it the most valuable item in their household. [1, 2, 3]
Would you like to know more about the Vogue home tour or explore other famous artwork owned by celebrities?
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A broke, basically homeless 20-year-old painted the Basquiat in LeBron's house on an old window frame he found. It sold at auction for $2.9 million.
And every one of those scribbled A's on it means something.
Basquiat made "Minor Success" in 1980. He was crashing at friends' places and selling drawings for about $50 apiece. Canvas cost money he didn't have, and downtown New York had busted windows and old doors lying around for free. So he grabbed a window frame, a wood panel and a mirror and painted on those.
The A's are Hank Aaron.
Early on, Basquiat used the letter A as his shorthand for Aaron, and he'd write it over and over like he was chanting the guy's name.
Think about who Aaron was to a Black kid growing up in Brooklyn in the '70s. He came up in the Negro Leagues playing for the Indianapolis Clowns. Then in 1973, as he closed in on Babe Ruth's home run record, about 930,000 letters showed up and roughly a third of them were hate mail. One guy wrote that he'd shoot him at home plate. The FBI got involved and Aaron had bodyguards with him. He hit 715 anyway in April 1974. Basquiat was 13.
The gold crown on top comes from the same place. When a curator asked Basquiat what he painted, he said "royalty, heroism and the streets." He put crowns over Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Jackie Robinson and Cassius Clay, guys America loved on the field and had no use for once they walked off it.
Now it hangs in the house of a man people have called King since high school in Akron, the same man who broke the NBA's all-time scoring record in 2023, a mark that had stood since 1984. So baseball's home run king, crowned by a kid with no money, ended up on the wall of basketball's scoring king.
LeBron said it's one of the first pieces where Basquiat started using the crown, and that's why it hit his whole family the way it did.
Basquiat was gone at 27, eight years after painting it. In 2017 one of his paintings went for $110.5 million.
He called this one Minor Success
I Love It! Every JMB painting will be worth Millions in The Future! -XOXO jzebraa
I painted JMB myself and it's on the Andy Warhol Museum Tumblr Page
