Mega-collector Larry Warsh peeled art off subway walls in the 1980s — now it’s going up for sale at Sotheby’s

In the 1980s, Larry Warsh loved Keith Haring’s drawings on the subways so much that he tried to carefully peel one off the wall. That moment began a collection that is now going up for sale at Sotheby’s and is expected to sell for some $10 million.

Warsh lived in the Downtown artistic mecca of Astor Place and coveted Haring’s now-iconic angels, spaceships and babies that he would illegally draw on pieces of black paper that were used to cover unsold ad space at the time while waiting for the train.

“I tried to pull it off and I couldn’t get it. I ripped it and gave up because I screwed it up,” he tells Page Six. “You had to know what you were doing. People were actively finding them and figuring out creative ways to take them off. Sometimes people took the whole fiberglass frame.”

In the end, he figured he’d just buy one from one of the people who’d figured out how to remove them properly. “I think [I paid] in the one thousands [of dollars], but not a lot.” 

“They came in a roll,” he says of the pieces, which date between 1980 and 1985. “They were chalk and people didn’t understand what they were.”

Thirty-one of Haring’s “Subway Drawings” from Warsh’s collection are now going on sale at Sotheby’s on November 21 as part of their Contemporary Day Sale with an estimated value of $10 million.

Warsh says of Haring, who passed at the age of 31 from complications with AIDS, “He was out and about. A lovely human being. Generous, cheery, active and here. He was right there in the moment and part of that energy and moment with Jean-Michele and Patti Astor and the Fun Gallery. It seems like a long time ago, but it wasn’t. If you were in that era, there was an energy and you could feel its importance.”

Warsh tells us his interest in Haring’s subway works came from “instinct, that you can realize an energy of a time.” “You have to feel it and see it. I buy and have bought and acquired by assessing cultural moments and assessing what will be icons of the future,” he says. “You have to take risks and feel comfortable with your ability to jump into a moment. For me collecting them was preserving them for this moment now.”

The works have been shown at the Queens Museum, MoMA and the Whitney. They will be displayed at Sotheby’s in a recreation of an old subway station to help patrons imagine them in their original environment.

“It took a while for me to want to part with them,” Warsh says. “It’s OK, it’s sad. But it’s OK because these were meant for the public and now they will have a chance to see them and look at them and some people who are lucky enough could buy them.”

Much like Haring, who created public works and believed that art should be accessible to everyone, Warsh says his hope is that “anybody who does buy this will continue to loan them to museums and share them so that others can continue to see them.”