Keith Haring Three Lithographs (Portfolio) For Sale

Three Lithographs is a portfolio created by the artist in 1985. The suite is a clear demonstration of his commitment to raising awareness of sexually transmitted illnesses. Keith Haring is widely celebrated for his open and outspoken approach to social issues, of which this is an excellent example. 

Plate one is the artist’s bold, brash portrayal of sexual transmission, in Haring’s own words ‘totally phallic.’ The figure’s erection takes on a human form, which then reaches to another small figure. Haring’s style is idiosyncratic, yet his iconography is instantly visually readable and understood. This serves the crucial purpose of delivering an accessible message in Haring’s activism and is linked to the artist’s beginning as a street artist. When the Pennsylvania-born artist moved to New York, he saw in the subway a perfect location to spread to reach a mass audience. Going on to display his work in galleries, his spontaneous style did not change. According to Gehring Haring’s Subway drawings’ ‘conception lasted for as short a time as their perception and Haring developed an extremely economical procedure’.  

The second and third plates in the portfolio appear to follow a linear narrative from the transmission that takes place in the first. Two is dominated by a malicious, twisted and jagged figure with a serpentine tongue: ostensibly the face of the illness. Here Haring’s aptitude for line is apparent, as the portrait is composed of monstrous features, somehow simultaneously disconnected and conjoined at the same time. In the third plate, known as the People Ladder, two matchstick figures hold several others upon their shoulders: a triumphant image of unity in the face of struggle.  

AIDs was first discovered in the United States just four years before the present portfolio’s execution. Haring’s artistic response is a powerful form of visual protest, one that commands attention that the epidemic did not receive from leading politicians at the time. Living, working and partying in New York in the 80s, Haring understood the impact of AIDs directly as a gay man: ‘While he rode round in the subway during the day daubing anything and everything — from sidewalks to telephone poles — with his little chalk figures, at night he frequented gay bathhouses, notorious S&M Sex club The Anvil, and legendary downtown underground venues the Mudd Club and Club 57.’ (Simon Doonan). Tragically, Haring himself would go on to contract the virus in 1988, that would eventually claim his life. Three Lithographs stands out as a seminal work where the artist deals with the subject of AIDs relatively early on in his career, and is nonetheless relevant today as the disease persists. Haring understood that ‘there really can’t be anymore anonymous sex’.