Keith Haring Bad Boys Portfolio For Sale

Bad Boys is a portfolio of five silkscreen prints executed by the artist in 1986. Unique in being some of the artist’s most personal, intimate and sexually explicit work, Bad Boys is a celebration of gay relationships. It is also unusual for being titled – most of the artist’s prints were deliberately untitled. 

Each example in Bad Boys depicts a sex act, but Haring’s broad and spiralling lines obscure the scenes: the viewer makes sense of each scene amidst an assortment of abstract shapes. In plate one, a reclining figure is depicted with two other figures. Playful and outrageous, Haring’s style is bold in both form and subject.  

Other plates in the portfolio, such as two and three, are visual close-ups of men pleasuring themselves, headless and therefore anonymous. The phallic shape is easy to discern, but the rest of their torsos are engulfed by Haring’s characteristic, fluid pattern, giving emphasis to the sexual act.  

Humour also plays a large part in this portfolio, and indeed is a great marker of Haring’s work. In plate 4, a man spreads his buttocks. His thighs and buttocks are at the very centre of the image, symmetrical and enlarged: a rather hilarious tiny head is visible between his legs. In plate 5, the busiest print of the series, a discordant array of muscular body parts dance freely.  

When viewed as a whole, Bad Boys is a visual homage to homoeroticism. Haring’s treatment of intercourse is quick-witted and artful: as his friend and contemporary Andy Warhol had done in Sex Parts (1978), he gives these scenes representation in an often sterile art world.  

As a gay artist living in New York in the eighties, Keith Haring was open about his own sexuality and devoted in both his life and work to raising awareness for safe sex. The artist was sadly diagnosed with AIDs in 1988. Speaking of saying that, ‘Before it existed, it is something you never would have though about, that you could associate love or blood, or sperm, with the carriers of death’, a quote which speaks to the artist’s progressive and liberal views on sex.