In Icons, a suite of five embossed screenprints completed shortly before his death in 1990, Keith Haring offers a visual lexicon that reads less like a collection of discrete images and more like a hieroglyphic narrative—an urban parable etched in bold line and chromatic urgency. It is perhaps no coincidence that this was the final work Haring conceived before succumbing to complications from AIDS, leaving the task of signing and dating the edition to Julia Gruen, the executor of his estate. The portfolio stands not merely as a testament to the artist’s enduring symbolic language, but as a poignant summation of the ethical and existential inquiries that animated his entire career.

The five figures—each distilled to their most iconic forms—span a psychological and spiritual gamut, from innocence to avarice, from defiance to transcendence. Their cumulative effect is neither didactic nor reductive. Rather, Haring constructs a visual grammar that reflects the totality of the human experience, rendered with the deceptive simplicity that became his signature. These are not “characters” in the traditional sense; they are emblems, or better yet, archetypes—condensed images carrying dense cultural and emotional weight.

The barking dog, one of Haring’s most recognizable motifs, serves here as a primal utterance. While the artist famously resisted assigning fixed meanings to his symbols, the dog has variously been interpreted as both a call to awareness and a commentary on authoritarian control. It stands on the threshold between protest and panic, a figure of both resistance and anxiety. The ambiguity is not accidental; Haring’s lexicon thrives on polyvalence, on the openness of signs to multiple, often contradictory readings.

The “radiant baby,” emanating energy in all directions, offers a striking counterpoint. For Haring, the child was a symbol of purity and limitless potential—a figure untouched by the distortions of ideology or the corruptions of power. Yet this baby is not fragile. It crawls with purpose, its energy extending into the world. In this way, the image transcends sentimentality and enters the realm of myth: it becomes a vision of unspoiled agency, a being not of helplessness but of essential vitality.

The so-called “smiley face,” with its exaggerated features and unnatural green hue, introduces a more disquieting note. Though Haring himself declined to ascribe concrete meaning to the image, its grotesque distortion invites associations with greed, consumption, and the grotesqueries of late capitalism. Yet some readings interpret it instead as a vessel of spiritual or cosmic energy—its grotesqueness not as moral critique, but as a form of ecstatic overload. As with much of Haring’s work, the icon resists closure, oscillating between satire and mysticism.

The final two figures—an angelic being and a winged man marked with an “X”—gesture overtly toward religious iconography, though Haring approaches these themes through a resolutely secular lens. The figure with the “X” evokes martyrdom, death, perhaps even the specter of AIDS itself, whose presence haunted the artist’s late work with increasing urgency. In contrast, the angel figure offers a quieter, more contemplative presence: not an image of salvation per se, but one of spiritual guardianship. These are not theological symbols so much as humanist ones—icons of care, loss, and the persistent longing for transcendence amid devastation.

Taken together, the Icons portfolio articulates a final meditation on the contradictions of human life: our capacity for both brutality and grace, for wonder and waste. It is a cycle of becoming and undoing, expressed through Haring’s instantly recognizable idiom of line, color, and emblematic form. That these works constitute his last complete project imbues them with an elegiac force. But unlike traditional farewells, Icons offers no final resolution. Instead, it affirms life in its full, maddening, irreducible complexity.

At the heart of this work, as in all of Haring’s art, lies a deep commitment to accessibility—not as simplification, but as ethical stance. Haring’s imagery, grounded in the aesthetics of graffiti, signage, and popular culture, refuses elitism. He created not for the academy, but for the street, the subway, the public sphere. And yet, his visual language, so seemingly immediate, reveals itself upon close examination to be sophisticated, layered, and enduringly profound. In Icons, Keith Haring does not tell us what to believe. Instead, he leaves us a set of images—radiant, defiant, tragic, and transcendent—that invite us to reflect on what it means to be human, here and now.

NOTES

This portfolio is offered in pristine condition, and includes the original portfolio box and title page.

Printed by Studio Heinrici, Ltd., with the publisher's blindstamp, Tony Shafrazi Editions, New York.