Keith Haring
42 1/2 x 54 in
Blueprint Drawing 5 (Littmann P. 177) assembles a sequence of sharply framed scenes that move between control, transmission and submission. Produced in 1990 as a screenprint, the work uses compartmentalised imagery to build an atmosphere of psychological tension, tracking a single ritual of power from its source down through the crowd it commands.
The upper panel functions as a control room. A dark, faceless figure kneels before a bank of switches, dials and readouts, wielding a rod that radiates energy outward. Beside him, a television broadcasts an image of another figure driving a spotted creature, its screen flanked by an atom symbol and a telephone knocked from its receiver — the iconography of transmission, energy and communication compressed into a single wall of devices. Below this control room, a dense crowd of nude figures stands packed shoulder to shoulder, faces turned upward, watching. The television reads here not as entertainment but as method: a device that manufactures belief and directs the mass gathered beneath it.
The two lower panels strip the scene down to a single body. In each, a lone figure lies face-down on stippled ground, arms outstretched overhead — a posture of prostration close to ritual worship or surrender. Repeated across two separate frames, the image reads less as narrative than as a devotional refrain, the individual echo of the crowd's collective submission above.
The Blueprint Drawings series allowed Haring to push his imagery into a colder, more schematic direction by removing colour entirely. Here, black contour and stippled texture dominate the surface, giving the sequence the visual register of surveillance stills or instructional diagrams rather than the chromatic immediacy of the Pop Shop works. The absence of colour heightens the severity of the imagery, forcing attention onto gesture, hierarchy and the mechanics of control — from the broadcast signal at the top of the composition down to the bodies bent in worship beneath it.
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