| Description |
Keith Haring, no coa, private collection, medium: ink, measurements: 36"H BY 24"W unframed, good condition framed, Biography: Keith Allen Haring was an American artist whose pop art emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture of the 1980s. His animated imagery has "become a widely recognized visual language. Haring was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on May 4, 1958.[7] He was raised in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, by his mother, Joan Haring, and father, Allen Haring, an engineer and amateur cartoonist. He had three younger sisters, Kay, Karen and Kristen.[8] He became interested in art at a very young age, spending time with his father producing creative drawings. His early influences included Walt Disney cartoons, Dr. Seuss, Charles Schulz, and the Looney Tunes characters in The Bugs Bunny Show.
Haring's family attended the United Church of Christ. In his early teenage years, he was involved with the Jesus movement. He later hitchhiked across the country, selling T-shirts he made featuring the Grateful Dead and anti-Nixon designs. He graduated from Kutztown Area High School in 1976.[He studied commercial art from 1976 to 1978 at Pittsburgh's Ivy School of Professional Art, but eventually lost interest,inspired to focus on his own art after reading The Art Spirit (1923) by Robert Henri. Haring first received public attention with his graffiti art in subways, where he created white chalk drawings on black, unused advertisement backboards in the stations.[20] He considered the subways to be his "laboratory," a place where he could experiment and create his artwork and saw the black advertisement paper as a free space and "the perfect place to draw".[21] The Radiant Baby, a crawling infant with emitting rays of light, became his most recognized symbol. He used it as his tag to sign his work while a subway artist.[11] Symbols and images (such as barking dogs, flying saucers, and large hearts) became common in his work and iconography. As a result, Haring's works spread quickly and he became increasingly more recognizable.
The cut-up technique in the writings of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin inspired Haring's work with lettering and words.[12] In 1980, he created headlines from word juxtaposition and attached hundreds to lamp-posts around Manhattan. These included phrases like "Reagan Slain by Hero Cop" and "Pope Killed for Freed Hostage".[22] That same year, as part of his participating in The Times Square Show with one of his earliest public projects, Haring altered a banner advertisement above a subway entrance in Times Square that showed a female embracing a male's legs, blacking-out the first letter so that it essentially read "hardón" instead of "Chardón," a French clothing brand.[23] He later used other forms of commercial material to spread his work and messages. This included mass-producing buttons and magnets to hand out and working on top of subway ads. All authorship of items in this catalog are described according to the following terms:
Signed [Artist Name] : In cases in which the signature is legible in the lot, this work is described as-is with no attributions given.
By [Artist Name] : The work is by the artist.
Attributed to [Artist Name] : The work may be ascribed to the artist on the basis of style, but there may be some question as to actual authorship.
In the manner of [Artist Name] : The work was executed by an unknown hand, but was designed deliberately to emulate the style of the artist.
After [Artist Name] : The work was executed by an unknown hand, but is a deliberate copy of a known work by the artist.
Circle of [Artist Name] : A work of the period of the artist showing his influence, closely associated with the artist but not necessarily his pupil.
Follower of [Artist Name]: A work by a pupil or a follower of the artist (not necessarily a pupil).
American, 19th century: This work was executed by an unknown hand, and can only be identified by origin (i.e., region, period).
Condition
It is the buyer's responsibility to inspect each lot and deem their own opinions on condition, description, provenance, and validity BEFORE purchasing.
All descriptions are visual opinions based on the auction house's experience and do not warrant as a guarantee.
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