BANKSY (b. 1974)
Crude Oil (Vettriano), 2005
Oil on canvas, in artist’s frame
Canvas: 91×122 cm (35 7/8 x 48 inches)
Tagged (lower right)
Signed, partially titled and dated Oct 2005 (on the overturn edge)
Provenance
Private Collection, London (acquired directly from the artist)
Private Collection, London
Acquired from the above in 2012 by the present owner
Auction History
Sotheby’s London: 4 March 2025
Estimated: GBP 3,000,000 – 5,000,000
Price realized: GBP 4,260,000 / USD 5,452,800
Crude Oil (Vettriano) | Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction | 2025 | Sotheby’s
Crude Oil (Vettriano) stands as one of the most instantly recognizable and audacious works in Banksy’s provocative oeuvre – a rare, entirely hand-painted canvas that epitomises the artist’s role as a cultural agitator and sharp-witted social commentator. Rooted in the anti-establishment ethos of punk, Banksy’s output has always been a performative act of defiance; a rejection of the rigid structures of the art world and the institutions that dictate taste, cultural and commercial value. From his early days tagging the streets of Bristol to the guerrilla-style interventions that catapulted him into the international spotlight, his practice has remained a direct challenge to authority, hierarchy, and convention. Crude Oil (Vettriano) was first unveiled in Banksy’s landmark exhibition in 2005, Crude Oils: A Gallery of Re-mixed Masterpieces, Vandalism and Vermin, and sees Banksy remix an image deeply embedded in the canon of Modern British Painting: Jack Vettriano’s The Singing Butler from 1992: a scene of desirable elegance and a vision of romance set against the elemental force of wind and rain. Then and now, Banksy continues to teeter on the periphery of institutional acceptance. Fittingly bearing provenance worthy the rock and roll hall of fame, Crude Oil (Vettriano) has resided in the collection of blink-182 frontman Mark Hoppus since 2011: a performer whose own thirty-year long career has been shaped by the same irreverent, outsider spirit that defines Banksy’s work.
Jack Vettriano, The Singing Butler, 1992
A couple, dressed in evening attire, waltz barefoot across a desolate beach, their poised movements seemingly impervious to the storm that rages around them. Bathed in a golden light that defies the overcast sky. The Singing Butler captures an atmosphere of escapist fantasy, its dreamlike quality resonating with an audience drawn to its fusion of nostalgia, glamour, and quiet defiance of reality. Here, recasting Vettriano’s elegantly attired dancers against a backdrop of environmental devastation, Banksy replaces Vettriano’s genteel nostalgia with a dystopian vision that speaks to contemporary anxieties. Vettriano’s popular painting has been painstakingly re-invented by Banksy, now featuring a sinking oil liner and two men in hazmat suits wheeling a barrel of toxic waste. Scalding the art world with humour and irony, Banksy delivers a complex dialogue that tackles prescient issues of our time, such as the environment, pollution, and the capitalist landscape. In this act of visual disruption, Crude Oil (Vettriano) embodies the very principles that define Banksy’s practice: an irreverent yet deeply considered challenge to the structures of power, taste, and authority that govern the art world and beyond.
“If you want to survive as a graffiti writer when you go indoors your only option is to carry on painting over things that don’t belong to you there either.”
By appropriating The Singing Butler and subverting its idyllic imagery, Crude Oil (Vettriano) operates as a wry commentary on both the sanitisation of popular culture and the selective validation of artistic legitimacy. One of the most widely disseminated pictures of a generation, The Singing Butler became the most expensive painting ever sold at auction by a Scottish artist when it achieved £744,800 at Sotheby’s in 2004, the record price for any painting sold in Scotland at the time. The sale, however, was met with an air of ambivalence from the art world establishment, a sentiment captured in The Guardian’s headline the following day: “Painting by ridiculed but popular artist sells for £744,800” (The Guardian, 20 April 2004, online). Vettriano’s disconnection between his enthusiastic reception by the masses – confirmed by the longevity of the picture and the myriad of paraphernalia emblazoned with The Singing Butler – and rejection by the art establishment struck a nerve with Banksy, who has long assailed the hegemony of the art world elite.
London, 100 Westbourne Grove, Crude Oils: A Gallery of Re-mixed Masterpieces, Vandalism and Vermin, October 2005 © Banksy
In 2005, Banksy staged his first conventional gallery exhibition, the now seminal Crude Oils: A Gallery of Re-mixed Masterpieces, Vandalism and Vermin, a radical intervention in the traditional exhibition format that remains a defining moment in his career. Held in a disused shop on Westbourne Grove in Notting Hill, the show marked Banksy’s transition into a more formal gallery setting while maintaining the subversive ethos of his antics in the streets. Crude Oil (Vettriano) was prominently displayed in the window, immediately setting the tone for an exhibition that challenged the hierarchies of the art world. Now considered a milestone in the artist’s oeuvre, the show featured Crude Oil (Vettriano) alongside three other fully hand-painted ‘remixes’ of canonical works: a despondent, bloomless version of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers; a reinterpretation of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks in which a Union Jack-clad hooligan shatters the bar’s glass window; and Show Me the Monet, a caustic reimagining of Claude Monet’s idyllic Japanese footbridge, transformed into a scene of contemporary detritus. Despite his immense popularity, Vettriano, much like Banksy, remains conspicuously absent from major institutional collections, a disconnect that sharply highlights the enduring schism between mass appeal and critical discord. For Banksy, this cultural paradox – where an artist’s work is revered by the public yet dismissed by the art world elite – has long served as a source of fascination and critique. By placing Vettriano’s The Singing Butler in direct dialogue with Van Gogh, Hopper, and Monet – artists firmly embedded in the institutional canon – Banksy staged a deliberate provocation, questioning the arbiters of taste and the exclusionary nature of the art establishment.
Across the gallery’s back wall of the shop, these large-scale reinterpretations were juxtaposed with a series of modified found paintings; traditional oil canvases sourced from flea markets and altered by Banksy to reflect the social anxieties of contemporary Britain. Quaint pastoral landscapes were interrupted by burning cars and police tape; a Renaissance Madonna and Christ child casually listened to an iPod; refined portrait sitters were recast as gas mask-clad figures. Further extending this anarchic approach, Banksy also ‘vandalised’ classical sculpture, transforming a serene Venus into a tattooed figure with a traffic cone over her head and outfitting a marble bust with a military-style balaclava. Yet perhaps the exhibition’s most outrageous gesture lay not in its visual content, but in its live component: 164 rats released into the space, their scurrying presence reinforcing the exhibition’s underlying spirit of disorder and defiance. Crude Oils was not simply an exhibition but an irreverent and punk manifesto, a statement that art, much like the rodents that roamed its floors, refuses to be contained by convention.
Louise Jury, “Rats to the Arts Establishment,” The Independent, 14 October 2005
In his Sunday Times Culture review of the 2005 exhibition, Waldemar Januszsak compared Banksy’s Crude Oils to a Surrealist or situationist happening, describing the production as an elaborate and engaging mise en scene: “So, the scene has been set, the evocation evoked. We’re in a dilapidated museum overrun by rats that have eaten the attendant and set a melodramatic post-Holocaust mood that continues into the paintings” (Waldemar Januszsak, ‘Who’s afraid of the big bad guy?’, The Sunday Times, 23 October 2005, p. 9).
Waldemar Januszczak, “Who’s afraid of the big bad guy?” The Sunday Times, 16 October 2005
Couched in humor, it is precisely this mood that pits Banksy beyond the cynical punster he is often perceived to be. Crude Oil (Vettriano) and the wider Crude Oils brilliantly attest to this. Indeed, from the mid-2000s onwards, Banksy began tackling an overt geopolitical agenda with increasing intent. Despite the cynical puns and sharp punchlines, there is an authenticity to Banksy’s project. This is what makes his work so powerful, appealing, and ultimately what will see him stand the test of time. Though retaining anonymity in order to continue making street art that is deemed illegal, he is widely discussed in the media and appreciated well beyond the usual confines of the art world. A vigilante painter of our times, Banksy has adopted a heroic position for his own generation and those to come.
MARCEL DUCHAMP, MONA LISA (L.H.O.O.Q.), 1919
PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART, PHILADELPHIA
IMAGE: © 2020 THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART/ART RESOURCE/SCALA, FLORENCE
ARTWORK: © ASSOCIATION MARCEL DUCHAMP / ADAGP, PARIS AND DACS, LONDON 2025 www.scalarchives.com
Via an unapologetic appropriation of its established icons and historical movements, Banksy engages a direct dialogue with other punk and provocative players throughout art history. Banksy’s appropriation and subversion of Vettriano’s The Singing Butler finds its conceptual precedent in the work of Marcel Duchamp, particularly his seminal 1919 piece L.H.O.O.Q. In this infamous intervention, Duchamp defaced a mass-produced postcard of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa by adding a moustache and goatee, undermining the sanctity of one of Western art’s most revered icons. The work’s title, when vocalized in French, forms a crude pun, further destabilizing traditional notions of beauty and cultural veneration. By targeting the Mona Lisa, Duchamp satirized the bourgeois cult of Jocondisme – a phenomenon of early twentieth-century France in which the Mona Lisa was idolized as a symbol of artistic and national heritage.
John Higginson, “A warning for the ratist in residence,” Metro, 14 October 2005
Banksy’s engagement with Vettriano operates within this same lineage of irreverent critique, aligning with the Dadaist tradition of dismantling artistic hierarchies. Much like Punk, Dada is a rejection of rationality and logic, a movement that praises intuition, and that relinquishes, opposes, negates all forms of control from art critiques to politicians.
Mark Hoppus photographed with the present work in his home in Los Angeles, February 2025
Growing up in Southern California, Mark Hoppus found a sense of belonging in the countercultural communities of skateboarding and punk music, where self-expression and rebellion against the mainstream were central tenets. His first significant encounter with fine art came through an art history course in college, where a passionate professor illuminated punk rock radicalism embedded in works from Caravaggio to Jackson Pollock. A field trip to LACMA and MOCA introduced him to the broader possibilities of contemporary art, but it was the Helter Skelter: LA Art in the 90s exhibition that delivered a pivotal revelation – Raymond Pettibon who was behind American punk rock band Black Flag’s iconic album covers, was featured in a major museum show. This moment crystallised for Mark the interconnectedness of punk, street art, and the institutional art world.Years later, this connection was reaffirmed when he attended Art in the Streets at MOCA in Los Angeles, an exhibition that marked a turning point in the legitimisation of graffiti and street art. The show included work by Shepard Fairey, Kenny Scharf, and Banksy, among others, celebrating artists who had transitioned from the underground to the institutional stage. In Mark’s home, surrounded by music, skateboarding, and counterculture, Crude Oil (Vettriano) became more than an artwork; it was a lived presence and daily reminder of the shared lineage between punk, street art, and the DIY ethos that unites them. In Mark’s collection, over time, Crude Oil (Vettriano) came to encapsulate the very notion of life imitating art, a testament to the enduring power of subversion, rebellion, and the refusal to conform.
Source: Sotheby’s
