Before Haring and Keith became friends, the young artist had already determined that he wanted to create a popular visual lexicon that could reach the masses and not be confined by the traditional confines of Fine Art Institutions. To achieve this, Keith looked to Warhol’s particular brand of Pop Art. This influence appeared in much of his art from the creation of “Andy Mouse” a cross between Warhol and Mickey Mouse, to the Pop Shop where affordable merchandise with Haring figures were sold. While Haring arrived at a fluid line to create graphic works at a rapid pace, Warhol relied on the mechanical reproduction of silkscreen.

The current lot is an acetate used in the creation of the silkscreen that relates to the series of self portraits that the artist executed in 1986. These paintings were the perfect manifestation of his declaration “If you want to know about Andy Warhol, then just look at the surface of my pictures, my movies and me and there I am; there’s nothing in between.” (the artist cited in Gretchen Berg, ‘Andy: My True Story,’ in Los Angeles Free Press, March 17 1967, p. 3) Throughout his career, self-representation was the lifeblood of Warhol’s work, and of all the Self-Portraits he made throughout his lifetime it was the 1966 and 1986 series which are most revered. Executed only months before his unexpected death on February 22, 1987 while recovering from surgery, the 1986 Self-Portraits are universally acknowledged as Warhol's last great artistic gesture in which he re-attains the artistic high-ground of his seminal works from the 1960s. They are the final, definitive self-image that Warhol left for posterity.