?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 50,000
KEITH HARING Bean Salad.
Lithograph, 1977. 300x200 mm; 11 3/4x7 7/8 inches, full margins. Signed, titled, dated and numbered 7/10 in pencil, lower margin. A very good impression of this extremely scarce, early lithograph.
Only one other known impression is in the collection of The Keith Haring Foundation, New York.
Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist by the current owner, private collection, New Mexico, when the current owner and Haring were close friends in Pittsburgh, 1976-77.
At the time this lithograph was created, Haring (1958-1990) had graduated high school and enrolled in the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh, a commercial arts school. However, realizing being a commercial artist was not for him, he dropped out after two semesters and continued to study and work on his own. In 1976, he hitchhiked cross-country and explored other art schools in the U.S. Returning to Pennsylvania, he was hired to work in maintenance at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts where he was immersed in the work of Contemporary artists. A break came for Haring during this time, as an aspiring fine artist, when he got a chance to exhibit his work to a wider public; he recalled, "When someone canceled an exhibition [at the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center] and they had an empty space, the director offered me an exhibit in one of the galleries. For Pittsburgh, this was a big thing, especially for me, being nineteen and showing in the best place I could show in Pittsburgh besides the museum. From that time, I knew I wasn't going to be satisfied with Pittsburgh anymore or the life I was living there. I had started sleeping with men . . . I decided to make a major break. New York was the only place to go."
According to the Keith Haring Foundation, which illustrates another impression of this lithograph (numbered 5/10), on its website, Haring was particularly interested in the work of artists such as Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Alechinsky and Christo at this formative time in his early career as an artist. He is quoted as saying, "I went to a huge retrospective by Pierre Alechinsky at the Carnegie Museum of Art, [Pittsburgh]. It was the first time that I had seen someone who was older and established doing something that was vaguely similar to my little abstract drawings. It gave me this whole new boost of confidence;" and, "I used the library at Carnegie all the time. I was reading a lot. I was really into Dubuffet at the time . . . the last works that he did were very similar to the little shaped things I was doing."
