Keith Haring Apocalypse Portfolio For Sale: Facts | Meaning | Market Demand

Apocalypse is Keith Haring’s collaboration with the writer who shaped how he made art: ten screenprints made in 1988, shown with text by William S. Burroughs printed on clear plastic sheets. Haring learned of Burroughs soon after arriving in New York in 1978 and told Rolling Stone in 1989 that the cut-up method he developed with Brion Gysin became “the basis for the whole way that I approached making art”. The two met in 1983, and by 1987 Haring was in Lawrence, Kansas for a gathering of writers and artists that Burroughs recalled, drawing on the pavement outside the gallery where everyone had met.

Burroughs was clear that Apocalypse was a partnership, not a tribute, writing that “Our work was of equal weight and purpose”, and that his first sight of Haring’s prints was “a shock – but a good shock”. His introduction to the portfolio speaks directly to Haring’s beginnings, noting that “art is spilling out of its frames into subway graffiti”. Commentators read the portfolio as a vision of the end of the world, made as Haring faced his own diagnosis, and the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Burroughs’s home town, showed it in 1992 as one of the two complete collaborations between the pair. Burroughs later dedicated his 1990 album Dead City Radio to Haring, “at the Apocalypse”, and for collectors the portfolio brings together two of the figures Haring most admired in a form that carries both their voices.

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