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

Ludo is the Keith Haring portfolio of five lithographs published in Paris in 1985 in an edition of 90, the year the CAPC in Bordeaux gave him an exhibition across its nave and galleries and he painted a mural on the wall of the museum’s lift shaft, and a year before his solo exhibition at Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris. It followed his first Paris presentation, in the 1984 Figuration Libre France/USA exhibition at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, so the portfolio belongs to the years in which his work was first being shown in France.

In 1984, after Haring painted a glass wall at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, a front-page article in the local press protested that an American artist had been invited to Australia to paint Aboriginal art. “I did not even know what aboriginal art was!” Haring recalled, adding: “It was news to me that they were so similar to the art of the Australian Aborigines.” He had already described the thinking behind his drawing in a 1980 interview with C. Flyman: “My drawings don’t try to imitate life; they try to create life, to invent life.” Commentators have often drawn the same comparison with the Ludo lithographs, made the following year, which sit apart from the dancing figures most associated with his name.

What sets Ludo apart for collectors is its link to one of Haring’s most significant friendships. He met the writer William S. Burroughs in 1983, and Burroughs’s cut-up writing had already shaped how Haring thought about words and lettering; the two went on to make two collaborative portfolios together. Burroughs lived in Lawrence, Kansas from 1981 until his death, and a Ludo 3 now in the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, in the same town, was given to the museum by his estate. Ludo is recorded in the Littmann catalogue raisonné at pages 44 to 47, and for anyone drawn to Haring beyond the dancing figures, it offers a portfolio with a French moment, an unfamiliar side of his drawing and a documented connection to Burroughs.

For more information or to buy Keith Haring Ludo prints, contact our specialists via info@alexyellop.com. Discover more Keith Haring signed prints for sale or find out more about selling your Keith Haring prints.