Jean-Michel Basquiat
Jean-Michel Basquiat painting to sell for up to £6m in Paris (Sotheby's)

Jean-Michel Basquiat's Crown Hotel (Mona Lisa Black Background) is to lead a Sotheby's contemporary art sale in Paris.

The painting is expected to fetch between €5m and €7m (£4.2m and £6m). It comes from the collection of Comtesse Viviane de Witt, the wife of a descendant of Napoleon's brother, the King of Westphalia.

The Basquiat piece was painted in 1982, when he was just 22, in what was considered a "crucial time" in his development: "It is a powerful yet coherent work of tremendous depth and complexity - the most important Basquiat ever to appear at auction in France," Sotheby's said.

Crown Hotel was first shown by Zurich-based gallery owner Bruno Bischofberger, who established Basquiat's global reputation. It features two icons of Western art - the Mona Lisa and Olympia.

It centres on a female figure surrounded by heads, symbols, text and colour representing conceptual references central to the artist's work.

Jean-Michel Basquiat
Basquiat's Dustheads sold for £32m in May (Reuters)

Basquiat became fascinated by the human body at the age of seven after becoming the victim of a serious car crash - his mother gave him a copy of Gray's Anatomy. He also studied Leonardo da Vinci, whose themes are common in Basquiat's paintings from 1982-83.

Also on sale in the Paris auction is Five Women by Willem de Kooning, dating from 1952 and estimated to fetch up to £510,000, and Andy Warhol's Vesuvius, which could sell for around £1,270,000.

Basquiat's paintings regularly sell for huge amounts at auction - in 2012, the Art Newspaper said he was the contemporary artist with the highest sales record for the second year in a row. His sales grossed £68m last year.

His most expensive piece ever to sell at auction was Dustheads, which sold for £32.1m in May.