Fair Warning Heads Underground With Keith Haring Subway Drawing Estimated at Just Under $1 M.

On the heels of a couture sale that saw the guerrilla auctioneers at Fair Warning tackle the runway, the house is going somewhere a little more underground—literally.

Its next major auction will offer a monumental Keith Haring subway drawing from 1984, one of the chalk-on-black-paper works the artist famously made on blank advertising panels throughout the New York City subway system in the early 1980s.

The untitled drawing, which measures 80 by 40 inches, shows a towering skeleton whose eyes have been replaced by clocks, surrounded by several of Haring’s dancing figures. Fair Warning has given the work an estimate of $700,000 to $900,000. The auction will take place October 1.

The drawing comes with unusually beefy provenance for a body of work that was, by design, made in public and never particularly intended to survive. According to Fair Warning, it passed through a private New York collection and Martos Gallery before entering a private collection in Los Angeles, where the present owner acquired it. It was exhibited at Martos Gallery in New York in 2025 and at the Fondazione Triennale di Milano in 2005–06. The work is also recorded by the Keith Haring Foundation.

Haring began making his subway drawings after noticing the sheets of matte black paper the Metropolitan Transportation Authority used to cover empty advertising spaces. Armed with white chalk, he turned them into the ground for a new body of work, drawing quickly and publicly as commuters passed.

“The whole beauty of the drawings is that they were so simple,” Haring once explained. “They told a story that you could see from a moving train and you could get it.”

Fair Warning founder Loic Gouzer shared a similar sounding idea with ARTnews about the sale, though the meaning was a bit different. “It’s the numero uno Subway drawing, one I’ve been trying to get for years—and we finally got it!”

The Haring sale represents another turn for Fair Warning, which only last week staged its first auction devoted to vintage couture.

An Alexander McQueen ensemble from Naomi Campbell’s personal collection sold for $1.3 million at that sale, leading a 23-lot auction that brought a total hammer price of $3.2 million. All 23 lots sold, giving Fair Warning a white-glove result.

The ensemble, from McQueen’s Spring/Summer 2010 “Plato’s Atlantis” collection, carried a presale estimate of $600,000 to $1 million. It was the last collection designed and crafted by McQueen prior to his death in February 2010. The lot comprised a bodice and skirt along with a custom reissue of the collection’s famous Armadillo boots made for Campbell, who wore the ensemble at Fashion for Relief in 2010.

The sale, titled “The Impossible Couture Collection,” was curated by Fair Warning founder Loïc Gouzer and Peter Brant Jr. and held at Brant Jr.’s Upper East Side carriage house. Conceived as something of a throwback to the intimate couture presentations of 1950s Paris, the auction nevertheless kept one foot firmly in the present: bidders in the room competed against collectors bidding through Fair Warning’s app and by phone.

The house of McQueen was represented by four lots in the sale, all of which exceeded their low estimates. A black-and-gold “Bee’s” ensemble designed by Sarah Burton, complete with a wide-brimmed beekeeper-style hat, hammered for $60,000.

Another highlight was a 1965–66 Yves Saint Laurent cocktail dress based on Piet Mondrian’s paintings. The dress, which was presented as possibly having belonged to the Belgian royal family, drew sustained competition before hammering for $600,000, above its $500,000 high estimate.

Celebrity provenance helped elsewhere. A midnight-colored Azzedine Alaïa evening gown previously worn by Rihanna hammered for $140,000, just below its $150,000 estimate. A sequined John Galliano dress worn by Madonna in the 1994 music video for “Take a Bow,” and more recently by Kylie Jenner at the 2025 BAFTA Awards, hammered for $110,000 against a low estimate of $100,000.

The auction marked Fair Warning’s first attempt at a dedicated vintage couture sale, and Gouzer suggested afterward that prices for historically important fashion still have considerable room to grow compared with those for fine art.

“I think people are going to be astonished by these prices,” Gouzer told Artnet News after the sale, suggesting the presence of institutional buyers. “They seem big for fashion, but then you compare it to art and this is clearly just the beginning.”