Keith Haring Pop Shop I Portfolio (Littman p.82-83) For Sale

Pop Shop Quad I is a portfolio of four screenprints executed by the artist in 1987. It is a larger version of the Pop Shop Quad I divided into separate works. The portfolio takes its title from the artist’s famed Pop Shop opened by Keith Haring a year earlier in SoHo New York. These works capture Haring’s well developed visual lexicon at what can be seen to be the height of his career. 

In Haring’s Pop Shop I, Haring’s characteristic matchstick figures lock hands, dance and embrace each other. Each example in the suite contains a miniature narrative of friendship and celebration that reaches its culmination when the portfolio is viewed in its entirety. Haring’s signature bold line and block colours create a visual style that is straightforward for its purpose in delivering its message of unity. But though sparse in detail, Haring’s lines still manage to convey movement, excitement and innocence: in the first plate, two figures sitting side by side with their arms around each other have a halo above them. This halo, commonly found as a motif in Haring’s work, was used to express innocence and purity. Likewise in the second plate, lines convey the dynamism of the figures’ waving and jumping. Haring went as far to say: ‘Your line is your personality’. The personality of Haring is certainly felt here with the artist’s confident use of colour and form. 

From the start of his career, Haring believed that art should communicate to a mass audience. After moving to New York in 1978, he enrolled at the School of Visual arts and became immersed in the East Village scene. His artistic and social circle was wide and diverse; he was friends with the likes of Jean-Michel Basqiuat, AndyWarhol and Madonna, graffiti artists and young students from the Bronx. It quickly became apparent that Haring desired an artistic career outside of the elite art institutions. Inspired by the graffiti artists, one day he saw the blank advertising boards of the subway: ‘I immediately realised that this was the perfect place to draw’. With only white chalk, Haring famously began what would become known as his Subway Drawings, the beginnings of an iconography which are seen in their matured print form here. 

Haring’s ascent to fame was rapid. After his inaugural exhibition in 1982 at Tony Shafrazi gallery, he became commercially successful overnight. At the point of creating the Pop Shop Quads, Haring had embarked upon one of his most commercial enterprises yet: the opening of his Pop Shop in Manhattan. Although in a mercenary setting, as with the subway drawings, Haring’s mission was accessibility, and he aimed to attract collectors and young people from the Bronx alike. He said: ‘The Pop Shop sort of grew naturally out of what the work was becoming anyway. The images had become part of the world and part of a universal culture. I had to go with that idea and let it happen, let it become part of the culture, let it become part of the mass culture instead of taking it back into the art world and hiding in the art world, which is where I was trying to break out of in the first place.”