Lucky Strike (complete set)

The series was co-published by Edition Pierre Keller and British American Tobacco, which invited Haring to reinterpret the Lucky Strike identity. He produced nine designs, five of which were selected for this set. Across them, the packet behaves like one of his figures: it bursts open, launches dancers into the air and, in the final print, rests in an orange hand as white ribbon-like forms spill from the top. In the yellow sheet the roundel replaces a figure's head entirely as it springs from a red box.

The green print stands apart. Its smoker, with stacked eyes and a neck of striped yellow bands above a red and blue polka-dot torso, is closer to the dense, layered drawing of Haring's later work than to the open outlines of the other four. Haring never treated the line between commerce and art as fixed, and the commission extended the thinking behind his Pop Shop, which had opened in New York the year before. The brand's logo is reproduced faithfully, yet the action lines, dotted ground and flat colour framing each scene are entirely his own.