Keith Haring Untitled (Portfolio) (Littman p.74-75) For Sale

Untitled is a portfolio of four lithographs created by the artist in 1987. In this tricolour set of plates, Haring’s signature matchstick figures appear alone and together, depicting a simple yet moving allegory about television and violence. 

The first plate in the suite deals with one of Haring’s most often reoccurring images; the figure with a hole through the stomach. In this example, the block flat colours of the blue and red heighten the effect of the motif. Haring first began drawing figures with holes through them after the shooting of John Lennon in 1980: ‘someone came into the Mudd club and told us that John Lennon had been shot.. I woke up the next morning with the image in my head’. Whilst Haring’s image does not reference Lennon’s shooting, its appearance is a wider comment on violence, emptiness and grief in society. In its reluctance to tell a detailed narrative, Haring’s wounded person compels the viewer to think about struggles faced in private and in public. It is possible for everyone to self-identify in the artist’s work, as Haring declared ‘(My figures) don’t have a race; they don’t have an age; they don’t have a sex.’  

In plate two Haring’s values of shared community are made clear where three red figures uphold a blue one – connoting the celebration of difference. It is a stark counterpoint to the next plate, where a lone figure appears inside a television, covering its eyes. The symbol of the television in the artist’s corpus is associated with the mass media, and its news cycle: in Haring’s own words he was ‘raised in America during the Sixties and learning about war from Life magazines on Vietnam. Watching riots on television..’ The unwillingness of the figure to look points to gratuitous violence – and in a case of double-viewing, we also watch Haring’s character through the screen. 

The final print in the suite, a figure with an ‘X’ on their abdomen indicates violence similarly to the first plate. He falls backwards in the air whilst a yellow figure attempts to catch him.