The artist and the collector

Basquiat's paintings are disquieting, often consisting of heads of warriors in a rictus of pain

By now, unless you’ve been living under a rock, everyone knows that the highest price ever paid for a work by an American artist, and for a painting made post-1980, was by a Japanese billionaire, who bested his own previous record of $57 million last year by paying $110.5 million for a Jean-Michel Basquiat last month at a Sotheby’s auction. For decades, works by Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Alberto Giacometti, Edvard Munch, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon — all European artists — have been walking off with absurdly high records that make the Basquiat seem like a