Name: The Story Of Red And Blue 5
Brand: Keith Haring
Rating: 5 (236 reviews)

Track auction value trend

The value of Keith Haring's The Story Of Red And Blue 5 (signed) is estimated to be worth between £1,650 and £2,500. This lithograph print, created in 1989, has shown consistent value growth, with an average annual growth rate of 6%. This work has an auction history of five sales since its entry to the market in May 2013. Over the past 12 months, the average selling price was £1,745, with a total sales volume of 1. In the last five years, the hammer price has ranged from £1,745 in June 2025 to £1,807 in April 2021. The average return to the seller over this period was £1,509. The edition size of this artwork is limited to 90.

Meaning & Analysis

The Story Of Red And Blue 5 is part of a series of prints called The Story Of Red And Blue by Keith Haring from 1989. This signed colour lithograph is a limited edition of 90.

Presented in the form of a children’s story book, this series is representative of Haring’s desire to create a visual language that appealed to both children and adults alike. Throughout the series he limits his colour palette to bright red and blue and renders each image in his distinctive linear style with black rounded lines.

The Story Of Red And Blue 5 shows an egg-shaped figure outlined in thick red brushstrokes, it’s smiling face depicted as a single-line drawing. Appearing to sit happily on a brick wall, Haring is deliberately referring to the character from the famous children’s nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty. Throughout the series Haring loosely refers to a variety of children’s fictional characters so as to make clear his allusion to the notion of a storybook.

Across the first half of the series, each print alternates in colour between red and blue and by the end of the series the two colours appear together in the prints. In each print Haring uses simplified and generic pictograms to produce the effect of a children’s story book without a sensical storyline, where instead the story seems to focus abstractly on the colours red and blue.

Keith Haring was a luminary of the 1980s downtown New York scene. His distinctive visual language pioneered one-line Pop Art drawings and he has been famed for his colourful, playful imagery. Haring's iconic energetic motifs and figures were dedicated to influencing social change, and particularly challenging stigma around the AIDS epidemic. Haring also pushed for the accessibility of art by opening Pop Shops in New York and Japan, selling a range of ephemera starting from as little as 50 cents. Haring's legacy has been cemented in the art-activism scene and is a testament to power of art to inspire social change