Keith Haring Bad Boys Portfolio For Sale: Facts | Meaning | Market Demand

Bad Boys is among Keith Haring’s most personal portfolios, a frank and funny celebration of gay relationships published in Rotterdam in 1986, the year of his solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Haring never hid the world he was drawing from, telling Rolling Stone in 1989 that he had arrived in New York fresh from coming out, “at the time and place where everyone was just wild”. The critic Giorgio Verzotti wrote that he treated sexuality, and male homosexuality in particular, with an “explicit directness” rarely found in contemporary art, and with a playful energy that runs through the whole portfolio.

Commentators point to the humour in Bad Boys and to the precedent of Andy Warhol’s Sex Parts of 1978, two artists bringing subjects usually kept out of sight into a gallery world that rarely showed them. The portfolio also sits at a turning point, since Verzotti observed that Haring’s effort to take the drama out of sex came just as the epidemic arrived, and a line attributed to Haring on the Foundation’s website sums up how much changed: “There really can’t be anymore anonymous sex.” For collectors, Bad Boys pairs Haring’s best-known line with some of his most candid subject matter, as much a portrait of its moment as of its maker.

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