Keith Haring Chocolate Buddha Portfolio For Sale: Facts | Meaning | Market Demand

Chocolate Buddha is the Keith Haring portfolio where the line slows down and pattern takes over: five lithographs made in 1989, printed in Paris at Arts-Litho and published there by Éditions F.B., in which the matchstick figures give way to dense, symmetrical mosaics of limbs, hearts, eyes and symbols. It is also a return to where he began. Haring told Rolling Stone that the drawings he made as a teenager were completely abstract and that “psychedelic shapes would come like automatic writing”, and when the magazine’s writer visited his studio in the summer of 1989 he found Haring painting abstractions that seemed shaped by a recent trip to Morocco

The title points east, and so do the patterns: in plate two, hearts and figures interlock into a knot that recalls the Buddhist endless knot, and the coiling arms of the last print call to mind the Dharma wheel, without depicting Buddhist symbols directly. For an artist who had been part of the Jesus movement as a teenager and who said “there are lots of religious images in my work”, it is a striking change of direction, and one shared by his downtown circle, since Basquiat had painted Bird as Buddha in 1984. The prints are as frank as they are contemplative, and plate three carries a horned sperm motif that had appeared in his collaboration with William Burroughs the year before. Haring had been diagnosed with AIDS in 1988, and for collectors Chocolate Buddha is where his spiritual curiosity meets his most personal subject, in his most abstract and restless line.

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