DETOURS

Adam Monahan:

What are we? I forget. Oh yeah, we're here to talk bean salad.

Marsha Bemko:

Bean salad.

Adam Monahan:

We are here to talk bean salad. Do you like bean salad?

Marsha Bemko:

You know, it depends on what kind of beans are in there, but I do like some.

Adam Monahan:

My boss at GBH's Antiques Roadshow, Marsha Bemko. Now Bean Salad, the art piece by Keith Haring.

Marsha Bemko:

No. What I really wish is that he had been my friend and given me a bean salad of that kind.

Adam Monahan:

So we had a piece by Keith Haring entitled Bean Salad that he gifted to a friend when they were either teenagers or late teenagers into early 20s. Now that I'm a little older now, I'd say as kids.

Mike:

We became friends just riding the bus together to go to work downtown in Pittsburgh. One day he told us all that he was going to go to New York and be a famous artist. We kind of responded with a little bit of skepticism of that prospect, but lo and behold, he did.

Adam Monahan:

That's our guest, Mike during the TV appraisal. Mike and Keith were friends for about eight months in the late 1970s before Keith became a world-famous artist known for his distinctive works full of animated figures and bold colors. He's most recognized for his monochromatic line drawings of dancing figures surrounded by rhythmic dots and dashes. The Bean Salad piece Keith gave him is a lithograph, which is a print made using a stone. Keith didn't make many of these. And while it doesn't really look like his laded work that he's known for, you can see the beginnings of his trademark style.

Mike:

You can look at that piece of art and you can go, holy crap, here's the genesis of this whole thing that became Keith Haring that we see everywhere. I mean, it's ubiquitous in society, it's in advertisements and it's in the AIDS campaigns and human rights campaigns and stuff all over the world.

Adam Monahan:

If you haven't heard of Keith Haring, there's a good chance you've at least seen his artwork. In addition to the bold colors and dancing cartoon figures, his art is also full of vibrant geometric patterns and shapes. He was a huge name in the New York City art scene of the 1980s and hung out with people like Andy Warhol and Madonna. Despite all of this, Mike never displayed the bean salad piece Keith gave him. In fact, he never even took it out of the tube it came in. There's a reason that he kept it in a tube and do you remember that?

Marsha Bemko:

I do, because I remember being morbidly curious about what the heck he was talking about. He kept it in the tube because he had all these mixed emotions around this gifted drawing.

Adam Monahan:

Yeah.

Marsha Bemko:

And at the time he was given it, there was no hint that Keith Haring's drawings, art would be of significant value, significant.

Adam Monahan:

Mike couldn't bear to display the gift his friend had given him, but he also couldn't part with it. But during his road show appraisal, he didn't tell us why. In this episode, we'll learn about Keith Haring's life, find out why our guest kept the piece hidden away for almost 40 years and learn just how much it's worth today.

I'm Adam Monahan, a producer with GBH's Antiques Roadshow, and this is Detours. Today, to Bean or not to Bean.

Can you introduce yourself, who you are and what your relationship is to the artist Keith Haring?

Kristen Haring:

I'm Kristen Haring and I am the youngest sister of Keith. Keith is the oldest and then two years younger is my sister, Kay, two years behind her is my sister Karen, and then eight years behind Karen is Kristen. And my parents, they raised us in a small town of Kutztown, Pennsylvania.

Adam Monahan:

First of all, is it true that the babies of the family are the brightest and best as I am?

Kristen Haring:

Oh, absolutely. Of course.

Adam Monahan:

Everyone knows that.

Kristen Haring:

Exactly. And Keith described that often to people in terms of why did he have the relationship with me that he did, and he said I was 12-years-old when she was born and a baby in the family was fresh, had no preformed impressions of him, had no knowledge of and therefore opinion of what he was doing, getting in trouble at school and things like this.

Adam Monahan:

Keith and Kristen were really close right from the start.

Kristen Haring:

He always took an interest in what I was reading and how I was thinking, and he would push me in my stroller to the public library and take out books to read to me and things like that.

Adam Monahan:

How would you describe him as your brother? Was he always artistic? What did you pick up from him?

Kristen Haring:

Keith was definitely always artistic. My parents noticed from when he was very young that he was not only interested in drawing but had a real gift for it.

Adam Monahan:

That artistic gift runs in the family.

Kristen Haring:

My father is a very gifted illustrator and my father would draw to entertain Keith and Kay and all of us, and he draws now to entertain his great-grandchildren. So sitting down with a piece of paper and seeing what they could develop was something that Keith and my father did starting when he was sitting on my father's lap, two-years-old kind of age. They would do these games where can you draw a straight line? Can you draw a circle with your eyes closed? And all of these things that of course, much, much later people reflected on and said, wow, I mean you were essentially training this person to draw from a very young age just because my father made games out of that.

Adam Monahan:

Keith kept drawing and making art all throughout his childhood and teen years. After graduating high school in 1976, he left his hometown and enrolled in the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh where he studied commercial art.

Kristen Haring:

That was kind of the only way my parents could wrap their head around how you'd make money as an artist was doing commercial art.

Adam Monahan:

Which is basically making art for advertisements and other commercial purposes.

Kristen Haring:

There were things that Keith liked about it. He liked being in a context of other students who cared about art. He liked access to materials and the kinds of classes he got to take that he hadn't had before, but he knew pretty quickly that the commercial art thing wasn't for him.

Adam Monahan:

So after a couple of years, he left the Ivy School.

Kristen Haring:

Then he had several months or possibly as much as a year where he was still living in Pittsburgh and trying to figure it out.

Adam Monahan:

Keith got his own art studio space at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and found work in various kitchens and cafeterias in Pittsburgh.

Kristen Haring:

So he must have been there in the cafeteria from breakfast service through lunch, and then he would paint whenever he had time.

Adam Monahan:

And that's when Keith met Mike, the guest from our show.

Mike:

Keith and I actually met while we were both commuting to our downtown Pittsburgh jobs.

Adam Monahan:

Mike was working in a record store and Keith in a kitchen.

Mike:

So we ended up riding the same bus to work on a regular basis and he struck up a friendship with me.

Adam Monahan:

And they started hanging out usually at Keith's apartment.

Mike:

He and his girlfriend at the time were living in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, got to be good friends with both of them. We just basically hung out and listened to music and he was a big fan of the Grateful Dead.

Adam Monahan:

All throughout this time, Keith kept Kristen up to date on his life in Pittsburgh and whatever art he was working on, and at this point he was learning lithography.

Kristen Haring:

So he wrote this letter sometime in December of 1977. He says, I've been running all over the city today. It is a very cold, cloudy Saturday. First I went to the Arts and Crafts Center and worked on lithographs. They're prints made from a stone like the ones I showed you.

Adam Monahan:

One of these prints would end up being the Bean Salad piece that appeared on our show, which by the way is an abstract piece that doesn't look anything like beans or salad or bean salad.

Kristen Haring:

If you had to characterize the kind of drawing Keith was doing those two years that he was in Pittsburgh, the first two years he was out of high school, a lot of it looked like this with this sort of puzzle pieces that fit together.

Adam Monahan:

The whole piece fits on a single sheet of paper about eight by 12 inches. It's made up of a bunch of interconnected geometric shapes, circles, rectangles and parallel hatching lines. All of the shapes are connected and shaded to different degrees.

Kristen Haring:

So he was really playing with space and definitely they were abstract and they were about line and how he could fill space.

Adam Monahan:

And why do you think that he put the name Bean Salad on this?

Kristen Haring:

He was working in the cafeteria of the Fisher Scientific Corporation and they had a corporate art collection and they also had an area where they showed changing exhibits, and that's actually where Keith had his first art show. There was a single page menu for the cafeteria and there was just an announcement on it one day that said Keith Haring Lithography Inc and other media opening December 13, 1977. And then there was a note that said that Keith worked in the cafeteria. So he was hanging work in this cafeteria and I think he was also hanging work at a health food restaurant that was below the apartment he was living in.

Adam Monahan:

Wow. And the idea that these aren't going in cafeterias or a place where people eat calling something Bean Salad is actually very apropos.

Kristen Haring:

It didn't surprise me at all once I pieced together that this was from, we know it's from 1977, the show of work that included lithographs was in December of '77. It wouldn't surprise me at all if he was making it for display in that cafeteria.

Adam Monahan:

After the show, Keith decided to give a copy of Bean Salad to his friend Mike.

Mike:

One day, Keith and his girlfriend and somebody else and I were all standing around in his kitchen and he was seeming a little different, I don't know what sort of, like he was making a formal announcement or something, but he presented me with a copy of this lithograph folded up in a piece of acid free paper, and I misread the name at the time. I said a brand salad, but I wasn't really blown away with it, but I thought it was sort of interesting. But he was presenting it as a real valuable gift, something that meant a lot to him clearly and I tried to honor it as such.

Adam Monahan:

Keith was advancing as an artist and the way he thought about himself and his work was changing.

Kristen Haring:

There was enough of an arts community in Pittsburgh that he started to understand himself as an artist to process that yes, what I've been doing all this time, all of my art's interest could go into that. I could be an artist. And it's the kind of thing where once you know that's who you are, boom, he was off like a shot to New York.

Mike:

I think my response to his saying that he was going to go to New York and be a famous or successful fine artist, I think my reaction was probably the same as the other people in the room was like, oh. Yeah. Well, good luck. Hope that works out for you with some skepticism.

Adam Monahan:

In 1978, Keith moved from Pittsburgh to New York City and began studying painting at the School of Visual Arts. When he wasn't in class, he worked odd jobs and continued to develop his signature artistic style.

Kristen Haring:

He was eventually in some group shows and people were starting to see his work a little bit. Eventually, he had a job painting the walls at a gallery owned by Tony Shafrazi, and I'm sure a lot of other people who just worked in a gallery very quietly one day told the gallery owner, I'm an artist too. And in fact, years later when I had talked to Tony Shafrazi about this, he said, everyone who worked for me was an artist. They all wanted to have their work on the wall. The thing that was different about your brother is he said it quietly.

He wasn't in there pushing it in my face all the time. So, Shafrazi looked at Keith's work, he liked it, he saw something special and ended up representing Keith.

Adam Monahan:

In 1982, Tony Shafrazi put together a show for Keith at his gallery.

Kristen Haring:

That was really the big coming out in terms of the art world crammed with people and New York was close enough to Kutztown that we drove up for the openings and things like this.

Adam Monahan:

What was it like being like a 10, 11, 12 and you go to New York City and this is all happening?

Kristen Haring:

It was a rough space. I mean, he was a student. He was a struggling artist. He was really living the rough New York that was the late '70s and the '80s. So yeah, it was a really strange experience. And in fact, I think kind of stranger was when it shifted, when suddenly going to these art openings wasn't just about the fact that it was a party and how cool it was that his paintings were on the wall, but very bizarre to me as a child, but really my whole family who had no real awareness of what the professional art world was coming into the understanding of, oh, everything that's on the walls here is for sale for not small amounts of money.

Adam Monahan:

Keith had been living as a struggling artist for several years at this point, but now people began to notice his work. The brightly colored cartoon-like characters and mesmerizing patterns in his paintings caught the attention of both the professional fine art world as well as the general public. And for Keith, both of these audiences were important.

Mike:

What he did is frankly astonishing as far as the democratization of fine art. He says, I'm going to sell this painting on a piece of Naugahyde cut out in the shape of an animal skin that took me literally an hour and a half to paint. I'm going to sell this to somebody for $30,000, but here's some kid coming up to me, just random kids on the street in New York and whatever. I'm going to draw something for them, sign it, date it, and give it to them. That sort of thumbing one's nose at the whole industry of fine art, I think, was astonishing and I had no idea that that was coming.

Adam Monahan:

Keith kept busy throughout the 1980s. He painted murals on buildings around the world in places like Australia, the Netherlands and Italy, and designed set decorations for MTV. He even made a print for the United Nations, the UN, and of course Kristen and the rest of the family were there for all the milestones.

Kristen Haring:

Just going into the city would've been a shock enough, but then suddenly being swept into this other world was really bizarre. We were at the UN and there were all these people going crazy, treating Keith this very serious artist when he was 25-years-old. So that kind of level of recognition and then just goofy, famous people stuff too.

Adam Monahan:

Goofy, famous people stuff like being friends with pop icons, Andy Warhol and Madonna.

Kristen Haring:

With very particular rules, some imposed by my parents and some imposed by my brother. I was allowed to go into the city by myself to visit him. So my brother's rule was I had to have his phone numbers memorized, his home phone number and his office phone number, and I had to have money with me in case I got mugged. And my parents' rules were all about, you will pick her up from the bus station and you will be with her the entire time she is in your care.

Adam Monahan:

And Madonna's not taking her out dancing. No matter what happen. That cannot happen.

Kristen Haring:

Yep. I mean Keith was great. He always took care of me.

Adam Monahan:

This was an exciting time for both Kristin and Keith, but lurking in the background, a new deadly disease was spreading across the city.

Kristen Haring:

During the early '80s, mid '80s, people started to have an awareness that something was going on where gay men were becoming ill and dying. And so Keith knew that he was at risk even before people knew who was at risk, how it was transmitted. But of course there was so little knowledge and there wasn't really anything he could do.

Adam Monahan:

Blood screening for HIV wasn't available until 1985 and there was no treatment until 1987. One way Keith could help the AIDS movement was with his art. Keith began to incorporate various images and messages advocating safe sex and AIDS awareness in his paintings, and he supported the movement financially. Keith gave a lot of money to the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, AKA ACT UP. They're an organization working to end the AIDS pandemic.

Kristen Haring:

Keith was giving so much money to ACT UP that there were years where Keith's donations made up I think it was a third of the ACT UP budget.

Adam Monahan:

Oh, wow.

Kristen Haring:

Yeah. So-

Adam Monahan:

Yeah.

Kristen Haring:

... Keith was very involved in ACT UP. He was politically active on many fronts, but certainly very upset about the inaction and inattention to HIV/AIDS. And in the late '80s, Keith realized he was HIV positive. He was public about that in a way that very few people were, and he was working furiously the whole time. He just wanted to keep living, of course, and doing the fun things that he could, but also keep painting and drawing, and he was making so much work.

Adam Monahan:

And then in January of 1990, Keith's health began to deteriorate.

Kristen Haring:

He was talking to my parents on the phone one day and they said, you sound like you're cold's really bad. And he said he felt bad. My parents went up to visit him for the day and they didn't leave his apartment until Keith passed away in the middle of February.

Adam Monahan:

Keith died at just 31. He was fortunate to see his work recognized in his lifetime. Since his death, his art has continued to be loved and appreciated worldwide.

Kristen Haring:

He always wanted to be famous and he cared so much about his art that he wanted recognition for his art, and he has that at the very highest levels.

Adam Monahan:

Rare early works like the Bean Salad lithograph Mike brought to our show are of special interest. Here's Mike and our appraiser, Todd Weyman in the TV appraisal.

Todd Weyman:

This is an incredibly scarce early lithograph dated 1977, so Keith Haring was 19-years-old at the time. It's one of only 10 impressions. It's in immaculate condition and you brought it here, just rolled up in a tube. You haven't had it framed or anything like that.

Mike:

I couldn't afford to frame it at the time that he gave it to me, and it's lived in a tube ever since then, frankly, because, well, sadly, it's got some sort of unpleasant-

Todd Weyman:

Sure.

Mike:

... Associations with me.

Adam Monahan:

Those unpleasant associations coming up after the break.

As we mentioned earlier, Mike met Keith in Pittsburgh in the late '70s while taking the bus to work. Mike was working at a record store and Keith in a department store kitchen. Their friendship lasted about eight months before they both left Pittsburgh. And so when he left, did you keep track of what he was doing, his art career or what was it like?

Mike:

I lost contact with him completely. After I graduated from college in '80, I moved back to Pittsburgh and I'd get the Village Voice occasionally, and I saw a picture of him in the Voice and I was like, wow, holy cow. What's he doing there? At that point, I sort of took an interest in his art career and was astonished to see that he was starting to get some acclaim, some notoriety.

Adam Monahan:

A little while later, Mike also moved to New York City and got a job as a teacher. Although Mike and Keith were living in the same city again, they didn't rekindle their old friendship, but they did see each other one last time.

Mike:

The last time I spoke to him was that one time that I saw him in '82 or '83 at a show of his in New York. It was a long line of people waiting to talk to him. I waited in the line, I got there. We talked for 30 seconds, and it was really awkward. I was eager to see him. I didn't know what I wanted to say to him. And when I got there, I just kind of went blank and said, hi, I'm Mike. I used to ride the bus to work with you and we got to be friends and whatever. And he kind of looked at me really oddly, and I said, good luck. And that was about it.

Adam Monahan:

I mean, he obviously probably remembered that if you were friends for eight months.

Mike:

Oh, I think he remembered who I was. Yeah. I don't think there was any question about that. Just my only question was whether he knew about my relationship with his girlfriend.

Adam Monahan:

So what we haven't mentioned yet is that when Mike and Keith parted ways in the late '70s in Pittsburgh, it was uncomfortable, at least for Mike.

Mike:

I was feeling a little bit awkward with him because I was far more interested in his girlfriend than in him.

Adam Monahan:

As we said earlier, Mike often hung out with Keith and his then girlfriend at their apartment in Pittsburgh. In the wake of Keith beginning to embrace his full sexuality, Mike and Keith's girlfriend became romantically involved. They were all very young, late teens and early 20s and unsurprisingly, the situation was a little messy and not fully transparent. It's not really clear whether Keith knew about this relationship or not, but it certainly made Mike feel guilty and awkward towards Keith.

Mike:

In retrospect, he was in the process of sort of coming out to himself at that point and to the people around him.

Adam Monahan:

And I take it, she was probably a little-

Mike:

She was taken aback.

Adam Monahan:

She was taken aback.

Mike:

And unfortunately, I think that also engendered some self-doubts in her that were undeserved. I have no question that they loved each other, and I have no question that that hurt her badly.

Adam Monahan:

This was all happening right around the time Keith was preparing to leave Pittsburgh and move to New York. His parting gift to Mike was the Bean Salad lithograph. Given these circumstances, it makes sense that this piece of art holds some uncomfortable memories from Mike, who never framed or even displayed it. After almost 40 years, he decided to put it up for auction.

Mike:

I'd like it to be in the hands of somebody who'd appreciate it. It's lasted this long without something terrible happening to it, and hopefully that will continue to be the case.

Adam Monahan:

Mike planned to sell the lithograph through Todd Weyman at Swann Auction Galleries, the one who appraised it on our show in Santa Fe. As we've mentioned, Bean Salad is a lithograph, which is a type of print, and just like any other print, you can make multiple copies called impressions. Mike's lithograph is numbered seven out of 10, so it's not unique, but it is extremely rare. And what makes this one even more special is that most of the 10 impressions haven't surfaced. Here's our appraiser, Todd.

Todd Weyman:

We have no idea that there are at this moment more than two known impressions. We know of one in the Keith Haring Foundation, which is listed on their website, and this other impression that the person brought into the Santa Fe event.

Adam Monahan:

In the TV appraisal, Todd gave Mike the replacement or insurance value for this piece, which is the amount it would cost replace the work with a similar one.

Todd Weyman:

In terms of a replacement value, it would be in the neighborhood of $100,000.

Mike:

Good heavens.

Todd Weyman:

And because it's so scarce, I wouldn't be uncomfortable with an upward projection of that towards $200,000.

Mike:

Good golly. Maybe it shouldn't be in a tube in my closet anymore. The replacement value is usually much higher than the amount a piece would actually sell for at auction. The reason is that if you have to replace your lithograph and no one is selling theirs, you'd have to come up with enough money to purchase an equally significant artwork. So when Mike approached Todd to sell the lithograph, Todd gave Mike a pre-auction estimate that was much lower than the TV appraisal, but honestly, still a lot of money.

Todd Weyman:

So I came up with a presale estimate of 30 to 50,000 and basing that mainly on the scarcity of the work, and also on just the stature of Keith Haring and his popularity still in the market today.

Adam Monahan:

On auction day, the Bean Salad lithograph sold with buyer's premium for $50,000, right at the top of Todd's estimate. It was purchased by the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, an organization dedicated to collecting and sharing art with the public. I called up our guest Mike to see how he was feeling after the auction.

So it hammered at $40,000, not too bad for something you had rolled up in a tube for almost 40 years.

Mike:

Yeah. I think that's a fair assessment. I thanked Todd afterwards, and he let me know that it had gone to somebody who both has an extensive Haring collection and displays all that stuff, and that made me very happy as well. Not only did it made me some money, but it'll get out there and people get to see the thing.

Adam Monahan:

And as an added bonus, this whole situation offered some closure for Mike.

Mike:

It's an episode that's remained unexamined about which I felt guilty for many years, and all of this stuff focused on finding this artwork and taking it to roadshow and so forth has helped me to reexamine that and to sort of realize that there's fault on everybody's part and there's forgiveness deserved on everybody's part. So I actually feel better as a result.

Adam Monahan:

There's a strong sense of fun at the heart of Keith Haring's art. It's hard not to fall in love with the cartoon-like figures and bright colors, and maybe that's what's been resonating with audiences for decades. His work was accessible to all types of people, not just those in the fine art world. And that legacy continues to this day.

Kristen Haring:

A lot of Keith's work was very serious on a political front dealing with social issues of injustice and inequity, but he really also cared about making people happy and giving people something that added a spark of joy to their life. And so it's of course wonderful that he has the reception in the art world that he was working towards very consciously from the time he was in his late teens. But it's also gratifying to see that kids still want a coloring book with Keith Haring images in it, that they still think it's fun.

Marsha Bemko:

Adam, this is making me think, I got to think ahead here. I knew you before you were famous. I knew you before you had kids. I've known you a freaking long, long time, my friend. And now like your host of a podcast, people mob you at our events, and I think it's time you draw me something and you sign it so that I could sell that bugger later for a lot of cash and say, Adam gave it to me because we're good friends. He loves me. He'd want me to have a little something to sell for later. Make Me Something.

(music)

Adam Monahan:

Detours is a production of GBH in Boston and distributed by Purex. This episode was written, produced, and sound designed by Jack Bonbreon. Our assistant producer is Sarah Harashus Script editing by Galen Bebe, and our senior producer is Ian Kos. Jocelyn Gonzalez is the director of PRX Productions. Devin Maverick Robbins is the managing producer of podcasts for GBH and Marsha Bemko is the executive producer of Detours. I'm your host and co-executive producer, Adam Monahan. Our theme music is Once in a Century Storm by Will Dailey from the album National Growth.

Thank you all for listening. Have a good one.

(music)