Keith Haring for everyone !

The Museum of Modern Art in Paris opens its Keith Haring retrospective on April 19, 2013 (until August 18). Sotheby’s is taking advantage of this event to organise a charity sale in Paris on 17 April to raise funds for the restoration of a mural by the artist at the Necker Hospital for Children. Indeed, at a global level, Keith HARING is very much in the spotlight this month, so we have decided to take a closer look.

Despite his somewhat frail silhouette, Haring was full of energy and he has left behind him a superb and heterogeneous body of work that includes in situ works, paintings, prints, sculptures and several thousand of drawings … Working in a broad variety of media, Haring even opened a Pop Shop in 1986 in the SoHo district of New York to sell derivatives of his work: he was very keen on the idea of democratising art and making it accessible to the general public.

Art in the city
In the early 1980s in New York’s East Village, Haring rapidly integrated the “alternative” culture that was expressing itself in the street. Like Jean-Michel BASQUIAT, he chose a direct and untamed mode of expression in the heart of the urban fabric. The subway became his first testing ground when he glued black paper onto advertising billboards and then draw his most famous icon, the famous Radiant Baby in white chalk, a symbol that subsequently became his signature. Anxious to reach the widest possible audience, Haring developed an immediately recognizable and coded graphic vocabulary. Economic, energetic and rhythmical, his style drew on graffiti, cartoons and comics and it quickly became one of the most popular visual languages ​​of the 20th century.

Between 1980 and 1985, he produced thousands of drawings in the streets and subways of New York. He was already animated by a sort of sense of urgency and his creative pace was furious, sometimes doing more than 40 drawings in one day. As a result of his incredible productivity and numerous trips to Europe (where he did in situ frescoes), his works gained a broad geographical diffusion. In fact, today there are nearly as many of his works sold in Europe as there are in the United States (40% of his auction transactions are carried out in the United States, 12.8% in France, 12.6% in the United Kingdom, 10% in Germany, 4.9% in Belgium and 3% in Japan, the Netherlands and Italy, etc.).

A collectors’ favourite
After the year 2000, Keith Haring’s auction prices began a rapid ascension and between 2005 and 2008 his price index nearly doubled, attracting a high level of fast turnaround sales. Examples include the resale of his canvas Sneeze (Via Picasso) that was acquired in May 2000 for $40,000 at Christie’s NY and was subsequently sold for the equivalent of $274,000 in October 2005 (£155,000 or € 229,000) at Sotheby’s London. In May 2007, its new owner tried to sell it in Paris through S.V.V. Tajan with an estimated price range of €320,000 – €400,000 (implying a 40% increase since 2005). His prices having risen just 22% between 2005 and 2007, the canvas was bought in despite a particularly positive sales context: the artist had just recorded a new auction record in New York a week earlier (May 17, 2007) for an untitled work measuring nearly 4 metres that fetched $2.5 million at Christie’s, doubling its high estimate. And that record still stands today!

The high prices reached by his large format works do not mean that Keith Haring failed in his primary mission of democratizing art and making it accessible to all social classes. In fact, his work has been multiplied and broadcast on all types of media and is substantially reproduced on derivative products. The price range is particularly wide: from a few euros for multiples produced after his death to hundreds of thousands of euros for the best works of the 1980s. Today, nearly 55% of his lots offered in auction rooms are available for less than $5,000 and among these affordable works amateurs can find original works (small drawings in ink or felt) for between $500 and $5,000. Take for example his felt drawing Pants Man (1988) presented on April 3, 2013 at Christophe Joron-Derem in Paris which fetched €2,500 ($3,200).

Indeed, this is precisely the advantage of a great artist who produced such a dense and popular body of work: all of his fans, whatever their budget, can consider buying one of the most significant artistic signatures of the 20th century.