Mura VI

This print comes from 1978, a pivotal year for Keith Haring. He had just left Pittsburgh's Ivy School of Professional Art, moved to New York's Lower East Side, and enrolled at the School of Visual Arts, where he began studying semiotics and soaking up the city's energy. "Mura VI" predates the subway drawings that made him famous, placing it in the earliest layer of his artistic development, when he was still absorbing influences like Pierre Alechinsky's large-scale imagery fusing writing and figures, and experimenting with how marks on a surface could function almost like a language.

The mezzotint technique is a striking choice for an artist who would later become synonymous with bold, spontaneous line work. Mezzotint starts from deep, velvety black and works toward light by burnishing the plate, meaning the artist reveals forms rather than drawing them. The rich black ink on cream wove paper produces that characteristic tonal depth the process is known for. That Haring was working in this labor-intensive printmaking medium at age twenty, before his street-art breakthrough, suggests how seriously he was engaging with craft and tradition even as he was developing the instinctive visual vocabulary that would define his career. The wide horizontal format, nearly twice as wide as it is tall, gives the composition a panoramic, almost mural-like quality.