Keith Haring, one of the most influential artists of the late 20th century, pictured with his artwork.
American artist Keith Haring rose to prominence in 1980s New York with the spontaneous, stylised chalk images he drew on the city’s subways. From this, Haring’s rise to fame was spectacularly fast, though his career was cut tragically short when he died from AIDS-related complications in 1990, aged just 31.
Despite his brief life, Haring’s reputation has only continued to grow since his death, and his artwork is extremely popular in today’s market. Though his primary medium was graffiti and publicly-sanctioned murals, Haring also created numerous prints; they account for 60% of the artist’s work sold at auction, where most fetch up to £5,000, with a significant number reaching up to £50,000.
Below is a list of Keith Haring’s five most expensive prints sold at auction. If you own a Keith Haring print and want to know more about how much it might be worth, or how to sell it, contact Mark Littler today.
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Andy Mouse
Keith Haring once said, “Had Andy [Warhol] not broken the concept of what art is supposed to be, I just wouldn’t have been able to exist.” This set of four screenprints in colours dates from 1986 and was made as an homage to the icon of Pop Art, whom Haring had first met in 1982 and subsequently befriended.
The prints are an imaginative amalgamation of the classic Disney character, Mickey Mouse, with Andy Warhol’s signature style of spikey wigs and glasses, thus combining Haring’s lifelong love of cartoons with his deep respect for the older artist. In Haring’s own words, “It’s treating [Warhol] like he was part of American Culture, like Mickey Mouse was.”
The playful, vibrant prints embody much of what makes Haring’s work so popular to this day. Even individual prints sell extremely well at auction, with the images accounting for nine out of Haring’s 16 most expensive prints, and this complete set of four created a new record for the artist when it was sold by Christie’s in September 2023 for £786,652.
Andy Mouse sold by Christie’s in 2023
The Blueprint Drawings
This complete set of 17 screenprints exceeded its top estimate by nearly £70,000 when it was sold by Phillips in April 2022 for £338,247. The prints date from 1990, the final year of Haring’s life, but they were based on drawings he’d created between December 1980 and January 1981, right at the start of his career, and around the time he first began graffitiing New York’s subways.
The series is executed in Haring’s instantly-recognisable style, and like much of his work, the images deal with themes of homosexuality, violence, death, and otherness, making them fairly controversial when first unveiled to the public. In the artist’s own words, they “form a perfect time capsule of my beginning in New York City.”
The Blueprint Drawings sold by Phillips in 2022
Dog
One of Keith Haring’s most well-known motifs is the dog; it appears in various different iterations (and it was even repurposed decades later by Banksy), but its defining characteristics – angular, pointy-eared, open-jawed, and frequently barking – remain the same. Though the meaning of Haring’s dog can vary, it most often symbolises oppression and abuses of power, acting as a kind of warning to viewers.
The dog in this 1986 print is slightly different; standing on two legs in a distinctly human pose, it could easily have been inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphs, and by the Egyptian god of death, Anubis, who takes a canine form. Haring’s dog is filled with a nightmarish series of violent, disturbing sketches that evoke a kind of modern Boschian hell, often interpreted as a comment on the response to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. The image retains its power to this day, and it was sold by Sotheby’s in April 2023 for £281,067, more than £40,000 above its top estimate.
Dog sold by Sotheby’s in 2023
Growing
This complete set of five vibrant 1988 screenprints in colours was sold by Christie’s in October 2021 for £239,134, nearly £95,000 more than its estimate. The images in the series feature colourful, intertwined figures who, as the title suggests, quite literally seem to be growing out of each other. In this sense, the images are a powerful symbol of solidarity, community, and harmony. Haring had always been extremely politically and socially active, and this only increased in the last years of his life after his AIDS diagnosis; in his own words, “If I was going to draw, there had to be a reason. That reason, I decided, was for people.”
Growing (Set of 5) sold by Christie’s in 2021
Retrospect
Dating from just one year before Haring’s death, this 1989 series of screenprints in colours is now among the most sought-after of the artist’s works. Many of the images were inspired by those found in Haring’s Pop Shop series, which paid homage to the Manhattan store of the same name that he opened in 1986 to sell his artwork at affordable prices, the idea being that it should be accessible to everyone.
The Retrospect series features many of Haring’s most famous motifs, including intertwined figures, barking dogs, and radiant babies. It was sold by Christie’s in September 2019 for £180,000, and it remains an iconic and moving print in the artist’s extensive oeuvre.
Retrospect sold by Christie’s in 2019
