Keith Haring Blueprint Drawings Portfolio For Sale: Facts | Meaning | Market Demand

The Blueprint Drawings are seventeen large screenprints made in 1990, the last year of Keith Haring’s life, from drawings he made at the start of his career. Haring drew the originals in Sumi ink on vellum over a few weeks between December 1980 and January 1981, intending to make blueprint copies of each. He took them to local blueprinters and, as he recalled, enjoyed explaining them to the men who ran the machines. It was the same period in which he began drawing in the subway. The drawings were shown at Westbeth Painters Space in February 1981, his first one-man exhibition in New York, and he sold several blueprint copies but none of the originals.

Many of the originals later left his hands and he lost track of where they went, but he had made photostats of each before selling any, and the 1990 prints were made from these. He described the group in a note dated 4 January 1990: “They form a perfect time capsule of my beginning in New York City.” The scenes are in black line on white and are violent and chaotic, with figures tumbling down stairs, attacked by dogs and hung by their feet, under UFOs and pyramids. Because the prints were made in the last months of his life, they are often read as a comment on AIDS and death, although the drawings themselves date from 1980 and 1981. For collectors, the series closes the circle: his earliest drawings, made into a late edition on a large scale.

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