Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Because it Hurts the Lungs (1986) will be a highlight of Christie’s live and livestreamed 20th / 21st Century: Evening Sale including Thinking Italian in London on October 15. The multimedia work depicts a life-size green figure with a russet, cyclopean skull against a white ground. Basquiat has applied sheets of his own drawings and text, among them a cryptic extract from the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci that lends the work its title: “Why the thunderbolt kills a [man and] does not wound him, and if the man blew his nose he would not die. Because it hurts the lungs.” Further collage and pigment adorn two boxes that protrude from the surface, including a drawing of the Lester Young Quartet’s 1944 jazz record Afternoon Of A Basie-ite, Japanese script, snatches of dialogue from Sophocles’ Greek tragedy Ajax, and a grinning, eyeless black head wearing a mitre-like crown. It is estimated at £7,000,000-10,000,000. UPDATE: 20TH / 21ST CENTURY: EVENING SALE INCLUDING THINKING ITALIAN, LONDON REALISES A TOTAL OF £64,561,000 / $88,254,887 / €75,923,736