Keith Haring The Story of Red and Blue (Portfolio) For Sale

The Story of Red and Blue is a portfolio of twenty lithographs created by the artist in 1989. The portfolio is formatted in the style of a children's storybook, and exemplifies the artist’s close relationship with young people. As a public artist motivated by social and political change, Haring often worked on murals with children – most famously, over a hundred children from New York boroughs were invited to work on a mural of the Statue of Liberty debuted at Liberty Tower. 

The Story of Red and Blue demonstrates, in printmaking form, Haring’s appreciation for children and his own playful nature. 

Rendered in black and white, with lively red and blue accents, each plate in the suite depicts a scene that would not be out of place in a comic strip. In plate one, a figure balances on an top of an exaggeratedly long nose and in plate eighteen a rabbit with a clown face runs away, looking embarrassed. Haring’s cartoon style owes much to his own childhood, as the artist’s father was a cartoonist, and the young Keith Haring loved to watch cartoons.  

Although drawn in a child-like, loose line and presented as a playbook, Haring’s Story of Red and Blue is at times explicit and darker than one might expect. A naked lady appears covering her private parts in plate seven, and the anthropomorphic pig of plate three is rather unsettling. This duality is seen throughout the artist’s body of work. Socially and politically driven to deal with taboo subjects, Haring said of children: “Children are color-blind and still free of all the complications, greed and hatred that will slowly be instilled in them through life.” Therefore the juxtaposition of the child-like and the more adult aspects draw attention to the mental shifts that children go through as they get older. Only on a surface level is The Story of Red and Blue intended for children.