Keith Haring

Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York
Skarstedt Fine Art, New York
Galerie Enrico Navarra, Paris
Private Collection, Taïwan

New York, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Keith Haring, January - February 1987
Munich, Versicherungskammer Bayern, Keith Haring: Short Messages, Posters 1982-1990, November 2002 - January 2003, p. 147, illustrated in color
La Triennale di Milano, The Keith Haring Show, September 2005 - January 2006, p. 265, illustrated in color
Galerie de Independence and Parc Heintz Fondation, Dexia, Luxembourg, Keith Haring: Works from the Navarra Collection, June - September 2007, p. 97, illustrated in color
Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon, Keith Haring, 2008, p. 226, illustrated in color
Milan, Vecchiato Gallery, Keith Haring, April 2009, p. 73
Paris, Musée en Herbe, The Hieroglyphics of Keith Haring, March 2011 - March 2012
Paris, Musée Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Keith Haring: The Political Line, April - August 2013, p. 261, illustrated in color

Germano Celant, ed., Keith Haring, Munich, 1992, pl. 117, n.p., illustrated in color

This work is in very good and sound condition overall. There are some very minor spot accretions and light evidence of handling. *Please note the auction begins at 9:30 am on November 14th.*
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

"Without contraries is no progression.
Attraction and repulsion, reason
and energy, love and hate, are
necessary to human existence.

From these contraries spring what
the religious call Good and Evil.
Good is the passive that obeys reason;
Evil is the active springing from
Energy.

 Good is heaven. Evil is hell.

When I came home, on the abyss of
the five senses, where a flat-sided
steep frowns over the present world, I
saw a mighty Devil folded in black
clouds hovering on the sides of the rock
with corroding fires."

- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790-1793

 

In 1987, at the end of Keith Haring’s tragically brief career, the artist created a series of 8 masks, each bearing a unique set of imagery, coloration and references from Haring’s aesthetic vocabulary. The masks are all constructed from aluminum and are adorned with Haring’s signature line and forms in enamel paint. That Haring created such a definitive corpus – only 8 masks in the span of one year – and never created another mask aside from this group renders each individual mask distinctive, deliberate, and entirely unique in his artistic practice.

The masks exude a tribal aesthetic and point to Haring’s own ethnographic investigation of folk art and cultural expression. Haring was not the first artist of the 20^th Century to look to African, Aboriginal, and Peruvian cultures, among others, for inspiration. Haring worked in the tradition of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque and Constantin Brancusi, modern masters who closely studied tribal masks, totems and various tools, using them as guides for their painting and sculpture practices. Haring even titled one of the 8 masks, Untitled (Egg Head for Picasso) to pay homage to his Cubist predecessor. For Haring, the mask perhaps also symbolized a sort of disguise, a costume for the exterior to veil the turmoil extant on the interior.

Untitled (Burning Skull) from 1987 is a gleaming fiendish face with eyes made of X’s, sharp, menacing teeth, and hair of lashing flames. In the center of the mask, Haring’s trademark figures lie intertwined in a heap, falling towards an infernal abyss below in the devil’s treacherous jaws. The mask appears deeply menacing, a veritable devil heralding an apocalyptic end. However, Haring counteracts the demonic figure with two key elements: the two winged forms on the left and right sides of the face, reminiscent of angel wings, and the artist’s cartoonish style, which maintains a sense of levity and whimsy in the work. Ultimately, this devil figure, a nightmarish harbinger of death, is foiled by life-affirming, heavenly signifiers, producing a work rife with duality and balance, which is perhaps the one constant theme throughout the entire life and oeuvre of Keith Haring.

Haring scholar Ralph Melcher writes of Haring, “A brief overview of the painter’s work immediately shows that cheerful, happy, optimistic themes by no means predominate, and that even many of the pictures of a basically or at least apparently positive mood possess an undercurrent of a darker nature...The numerous scenes of perforation, in the concrete bodily sense as well as the figurative sexual sense, the monsters, absurd creatures, skeletons, snakes and beasts of prey which populate Haring’s pictures, in particular almost always add a more or less tangible, nightmarish or violent character to his multi-figured, pattern-like works. This antagonism between the figures, the struggle between the two poles, extending even to individual figures which combine these good and evil attributes and characteristics, is one of the chief features of Haring’s art as regards the division of picture space and the composition of the colors.” (Melcher in Exh. Cat., Karlsruhe, Museum für Neue Kunst (and travelling), Keith Haring: Heaven and Hell, 2001, p. 12)

In 1989, Haring took a photograph of himself and drew on it a halo, a set of angel wings, a rope binding his torso and legs, and handcuffs shackled to his ankles. This simplistic drawing, facilely and ably rendered, profoundly embodies Haring’s paradoxical being. In David Galloway’s essay, he writes, “It is an underlying duality which makes the early works more than naïve cartoons, the late ones more than angry odes to man’s mortality. Fitted out with the wings necessary to ascend into heaven and the shackles drawing him down into the fire and brimstone of hell, Keith Haring demonstrated an astonishingly precocious grasp of the inherent ambiguities of his generation, of his age.” (Galloway in Ibid., p. 57)

Haring’s body of work is replete with paradoxical themes, including life and death, religion and sexuality, innocence and experience, heaven and hell, good and evil. Best known for his cartoonish smiling faces, oversized red hearts, and dancing figures, Haring’s more aggressive and sexually explicit imagery is often overlooked or dismissed. But for Haring, the balance between light and heavy, playful and serious was intrinsic to his art and to his life. He often cited two of the most profound influences on his art as Dante, writer of Inferno (c. 14^th Century), and Hieronymus Bosch, painter of The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510) – two veritable embodiments of such juxtaposition.

In 1984, Haring began a series of paintings entitled Heaven and Hell, and one year later created the set backdrop for the Ballet National de Marseilles production of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The title of the ballet is directly linked to William Blake’s 18^th Century poem by the same name, a study in opposites of good and evil, angel and devil. Haring adopts Blake’s duplicity of meaning in the 1984-1985 paintings, and again, powerfully in Untitled (Burning Skull). The imagery depicted on the mask pulls the viewer between the two poles of heaven and hell, reasserting Blake’s themes and simultaneously asserting our own mortality. Executed the year before Haring was diagnosed with HIV, this mask feels ominously premonitory and foreboding. Indeed, Haring’s later work is imbued with a sense of impending doom, yet with a simultaneous contemplation and reaffirmation of life.  

Haring’s masks, and in particular this exceptionally powerful example, is the ultimate embodiment of the artist’s entire oeuvre, a study in masterful duality. To encounter Untitled (Burning Skull) is to confront Haring’s very being – to come face-to-face with his reality of illness, mortality and death, yet palpably sensing the artist’s joie de vivre and exuberant spirit.