Christie’s announced the sale of a record-setting Jean-Michel Basquiat self-portrait in London early next month. Bloomberg’s Scott Reyburn has Christis’s Basquiat big wig, Brett Gorvy, confirming that the work has a third-party guarantee. Other sources say the guarantee is between $18 & 20m. So another record for Basquiat will be set one way or another:

Undertaken in 1981 and formerly owned by the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Untitled is one of the artist’s earliest masterpieces, marrying the gritty urbanism of his street graffiti with his raw and guttural symbolism. In 2007, Untitled, sold for $14.6 million, breaking the artist’s world auction record at the time, today, the estimate is within the region of $20 million, positioning it to break Basquiat’s record again, which was achieved last May in New York at $16.3 million.

Christie’s London – Basquiat June 2012