Keith Haring, “Three Eyed Monster,” 1990. (From the White Icons Series)

Keith Haring, “Three Eyed Monster,” 1990. (From the White Icons Series) 

In 1990, the final year of his life, Keith Haring distilled his entire visual universe into its purest essence with the White Icons portfolio: five embossed prints on pristine white Arches Cover paper. Stripped of the electric colors that defined his street-art fame, these works exist as pure relief—raised white lines on white paper that only reveal themselves through light and shadow. The series functions like a personal iconostasis: Radiant Baby, Barking Dog, Angel, Flying Devil, and the unforgettable Three Eyed Monster.

The Three Eyed Monster is the most unsettling and hypnotic of the five.

A square-headed creature stares out from the center of the 21 × 25 inch sheet, its form emerging from the paper like a fossil pressed into snow. Three enormous eyes dominate the top half of its face—perfectly round, wide-open, arranged in a strict horizontal row. Each eye is outlined in Haring’s thick, confident line, with a small inner shape that gives the impression of a pupil locked directly on the viewer. There is no iris, no sclera, no mercy. Just three unblinking voids.

Below them sits a tiny, almost dismissive squiggle of a nose. Then the mouth takes over the entire lower half of the face—a colossal, ear-to-ear grin that looks like it could swallow the world. A neat row of rectangular teeth gleams across the smile, while two small curved motion lines on either side suggest the creature is either laughing hysterically or growling with delight. The entire head is framed by a thin square border, as if Haring wanted to contain this thing before it escaped the paper.

Because it is embossed rather than printed in color, the monster feels strangely alive. Tilt the sheet under light and the raised lines cast soft shadows that shift as you move—making the eyes seem to follow you, the grin widen and contract. It is simultaneously cartoonish and demonic, joyful and terrifying, exactly the kind of contradiction Haring loved.

This is not the friendly Radiant Baby or the playful Barking Dog. This is the creature that lives in the corner of Haring’s universe—the one that watches, the one that knows too much, the one that smiles anyway. In the white-on-white silence of the White Icons, the Three Eyed Monster feels like Haring’s final, most intimate self-portrait: an artist who saw the world with three eyes and still chose to grin.

Edition details (confirmed across auction records and the Littmann catalogue raisonné, pp. 172–173):

•  Edition size: 60 numbered impressions

•  Artist’s proofs: 10 additional impressions

•  Publisher: Tony Shafrazi Editions, Inc., New York (their blindstamp appears on the sheet)

•  Printer: Studio Heinrici Ltd., New York

•  Signature / Authentication: Because Haring died on February 16, 1990, before the full edition was pulled, each print is estate-approved. On the reverse is a stamped Certificate of Authenticity signed in pencil by Julia Gruen (Haring’s studio manager and executor of his estate), often dated “6/28/90” (the date many certificates were finalized), and numbered (e.g., 14/60 or 59/60).

This was not mass production; it was a quiet, almost sacred act of reduction. In the white-on-white silence, the Three Eyed Monster becomes Haring’s most intimate self-portrait: a being that sees everything, feels everything, and still smiles.

This example will also come with the cover page from the Portfolio.