Keith Haring’s Gifts to His Childhood Friend Are Heading to Auction
A group of intimate Keith Haring works that spent decades in the hands of his childhood friend Kermit Oswald will be shown at Sotheby’s Breuer Building on the Upper East Side before going under the hammer in May. The sale offers a rare look at the personal side of the American artist’s practice, where friendship, exchange, and improvisation often overlapped.
Oswald, who has known Haring since kindergarten in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, was part of the artist’s life long before the subway drawings and the international attention that followed. As teenagers, the two took buses into New York to visit museums and galleries. After Haring enrolled at the School of Visual Arts in 1978, they kept up a steady correspondence, trading letters, gifts, and visits. Oswald later installed Haring’s exhibitions, and Haring became godfather to Oswald’s child.
The works now coming to market reflect that long relationship. Sotheby’s describes the group as a trove of rare works, but many of the pieces are better understood as personal gifts. They include woodcarvings, a dresser, a child’s crib, and screen-print drawings, all marked by Haring’s unmistakable line. The most valuable lot is a 1985 self-portrait, one of only six Haring made, in which his bespectacled face is attached to the body of a sphinx. Oswald chose it during a studio visit, and it carries an estimate of $3 million to $5 million.
The crib and dresser, painted in celebration of the birth of Oswald’s first child, are each estimated at $250,000 to $350,000. Haring coated them in sunny yellow and added dots, squiggles, caricatures of Oswald and his wife, and dachshunds in tribute to the family dog. Also in the sale is a carved wood sculpture from 1983, made for Haring’s floor-to-ceiling takeover at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, with an upper estimate of $800,000. A bright blue square showing a man falling down stairs is estimated at $150,000 to $200,000.
The sale arrives after Sotheby’s sold 31 of Haring’s chalk Subway drawings for $9.2 million. The artist’s auction record remains $6.5 million for Untitled (1982), sold at Sotheby’s New York in 2017. A separate online auction in October will offer 41 additional works from Oswald’s collection, extending the story of a friendship that helped shape Haring’s life as much as his art.
