Keith Haring Untitled (Clown) (Littman p.92) For Sale

Untitled is a silkscreen created by the artist in 1988, depicting a clownish figure with the year of the print’s creation morphing into its body. The work is unique in Haring’s corpus for depicting a single figure in a style of atypical of Haring’s, famous for his uniform matchstick men and commonly recognised symbols such as extraterrestrials and dogs. There is a hand drawn quality to the silkscreen. 

It is likely that Untitled is a work of political satire, as the clown wears an officious-looking suit and tie. The year 1989, which Haring exaggerates and pays much attention to by boldly drawing the numbers, happens to be the year of George H. W. Bush’s inauguration. In an interview with Rolling Stone in the very same year, Haring made no secret of his disdain for the politician: 

‘They’re supposedly having a war on drugs now, but the whole time Bush was vice-president the amounts of cocaine coming into the country were phenomenal’. 

Haring was well known for his social and political activism, with his visual lexicon of colourful figures and symbols used as a vehicle for delivering messages about important topics in an accessible manner for the mass public. Perhaps his most famous mural, Crack is Whack, was a visual protest to raise awareness of the crack cocaine epidemic which Haring mentions in the quotation. The unsavoury depiction of a nameless, but implied, politician in Untitled makes the involvement of the government in drug trafficking and the epidemic abundantly clear.