As the November tent auction season approaches and the big auction houses get busy revealing their top lots, the search for who sent what and why begins. Provenance, as we know, can play a major role in establishing and confirming the value of a work of art, whether by arousing renewed interest, providing assurance to buyers or by adding historical context to the art. Sotheby's, meanwhile, recently announced that a group of thirty-one rare Keith Haring subway paintings will play in the Contemporary Day Sale on November 21 with a combined estimate of between $6.3 and $9 million. This is a very exciting time for Haring collectors as none of these works have ever been offered at auction before, and it is extremely difficult to find an original in such a well-preserved condition.
Haring came from a poor family in Pennsylvania. His father was a novice cartoonist, from his youth, he encouraged Keith to create his own characters. Haring's talent for drawing led to his receiving a scholarship to attend the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he studied semiotics, but it was his contact with the ubiquitous street art of 1980s New York that inspired him most.
Haring began drawing on the train as a hobby on his way to work: noticing that the MTA had covered unpaid advertisements with black paper, he began scrawling his visible tongue on them with white chalk. In short, his unique and highly visible style attracted his first fans. Nevertheless, Haring continued to paint in front of crowds and the NYPD, who ticketed him and even arrested him for vandalism for the next five years. Self-explanation in a published essay Art in Transportation: Subway Paintingspublished in 1984, he said he felt his work was “more of a responsibility than a hobby,” a way to leave a critical mark as an individual in a cannibalistic metropolis ruled by corporate interests and the unstoppable speculation of real estate and populism. Even as Haring's career flourished and he established himself as a leading figure in the downtown art scene, he said the railroad was still his “favorite place to paint.”
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During his subway career, he assigned thousands of black panels to create a powerful symbol to create a list of iconic images, such as his nuclear dogs, angels, flying saucers, children, smiley faces, etc.—images that are closely associated with him. creative haunt, Club 57. “I think the origin of the subway paintings was part of how it came about in a sense, where it was part of Keith's DNA,” Gil Vazquez, executive director of the Keith Haring Foundation, said in a statement. . “There is an important element of generosity. When I think of the subway paintings, I see them as one of Keith's first acts of activism.”
Given the nature of urban guerrilla art, many subway paintings have been lost or destroyed, making those that come to auction a real rarity for fans and institutions looking to add to their collections. Because of their importance and rarity, these works have also been included in prominent exhibitions, including the Brooklyn Museum's critically acclaimed 2012 exhibit of Haring's work titled “Keith Haring: 1978-1982,” which was the last time the group exhibited together. Most of the works coming up for auction have a long exhibition history, such as Untitled (Still Living '85), which is one of the last subway paintings and has been featured in many prominent exhibitions at MoMA, the Reading Public Museum in Pennsylvania, the Musee d'Art moderne de la Ville in Paris, the Young Museum in San Francisco and the Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung. in Rotterdam.
Behind their remarkable survival is an avid art collector, Larry Warsh, who has taken charge of these thirty-one works for nearly 40 years, creating the most unique and extensive collection of Haring subway paintings in private hands. The Observer spoke with Wash to understand how those treasures came into his collection, the importance of preserving these paintings, and, more generally, what is in his art collection today.
“I've been collecting Keith Haring since the mid-'80s, and I collect all kinds of paintings, drawings, subway drawings, even cars, anything related to Keith that was compulsive at the time,” Warsh told the Observer. . Undoubtedly, the collector was one of the first supporters of Keith Haring, despite the fact that he does not see himself as a cultural defender. “I was his fan in support of his personality, what he stood for and what he did. I was not a traditional fan; I just gave money or attended all the gallery events. I was more innocent in the sense of seeing his genius and what he was doing at that time. It was a different time.”
Warsh is also an art historian, having published three books about Keith Haring. When asked how he recognized Haring's talent early on and realized that his work would have an important history, he wishes. “First, it was him, as a creator and a person. Wherever he painted as art, his energy and interpretation of signs and symbols were different, and many people felt comfortable looking at his art. It was everyone's art. He makes art for everyone, and is a generous and caring person; he cared about causes; he cared about the children.”
Those subway paintings were part of his three-dimensional works—Warsh is currently writing a book about them—and connect him to the Duchampian idea of the ready-made, bringing it to a democratic and social level by accepting things in urban spaces. “He was a student of the immediate art movement in painting and drawing things like Duchamp, so these are considered found objects.”
Although he sometimes tried to get them directly from the subway, Warsh admitted that getting them out was difficult, so he just started finding them and compulsively buying them. “I hunted and tried to collect for myself as a profession,” he said. “It was not commercial. It is about the importance of history. My feeling was that these were historically important.” For the same reason, he also started buying Basquiat's notebooks, being one of the first to acknowledge the historical importance of those texts. Today, he also has a very wide collection of them. “It is not a commercial policy that made me choose. It was a crazy, depressing personality that I had for years.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Warsh began collecting very early in his life, having been introduced to art by an uncle who was a German art collector. However, he really got into it when he moved to New York City, fully immersing himself in the art scene and the collective energy that shaped the entire community, making the fertile ground for every period in art history possible. “I was interested in the power of that time,” Warsh explained. “My best friend Renee Ricard used to visit me at night and all kinds of things. So I learned with my eyes, and I felt with my feelings, and I had to look to the future and feel that what I was collecting in the present will have value. Not just commercial value, but historical value.”
Asked why he wanted to part with them, Warsh said he wanted to let them circulate and be seen again by giving ownership to another collector or, preferably, an institution that would show them. “I think I've done my job to accumulate them as a body of work,” he said. “They were exhibited in museums; we made a book, which has one version in Mandarin. I don't want to be as creative anymore as I wanted to be. I was happy with what I did, but now it's time for institutions to have the opportunity to add these paintings to their collections because they are the most important works done by this artist, I believe.”
To promote the importance of this group of works, Sotheby's is hosting an in-depth exhibition of subway paintings that will help visitors visualize these works where they were created by transforming the galleries into a modern subway station with turnstiles, benches and archival photos. Warsh is excited to see what auction house and exhibition partner Samsung (SSNLF) is cooking up, as it aligns with his desire to share Haring's art with as many people as possible, especially in the city. “I think the people of New York will want to come and see this because everyone always hears about them or sees pictures, but very few have had the opportunity to see these paintings for themselves,” he said. “To see them in person, to see how fragile they are and how sensitive they are, will leave everyone in awe.” Wash concluded that he hopes the exhibit will enhance the value of Keith Haring's work and renew interest in it by showing its relevance as an important part of an important period in New York's cultural history.
“Art in Transit: 31 Keith Haring Subway Paintings from the Collection of Larry Warsh” will be on display at Sotheby's York Avenue gallery from November 8-20 before going on the block on November 21 at the Contemporary Day Sale.
