In 1986, Keith Haring opens Pop Shop, a SoHo retail store on Lafayette Street selling merchandise emblazoned with his signature graffiti. After a meteoric rise to fame, Jean-Michel Basquiat dies in 1988 of a drug overdose. In 1980 Georgia O’Keeffe sues for the return of three of her paintings that disappeared during a 1946 show after they reappear in Barry Snyder’s Princeton, New Jersey, gallery. O’Keeffe gets one work, Snyder gets another; the two split the proceeds from the sale of the third. Andy Warhol dies on February 22, 1987. In 1988, Sotheby’s holds a sale of the Warhol collection, and watch mogul Gedalio Grinberg nabs most of the artist’s famed cookie jars for $250,000. The Whitney Museum buys Jasper Johns’s Three Flags, 1958, for $1 million in 1980. Johns’s Out the Window, 1959, makes $3.63 million at Sotheby’s in 1986. But prices peak in 1988, when False Start, 1959, goes for $17.05 million at Sotheby’s, shocking the salesroom. Richard Serra’s 120-foot-long Tilted Arc, installed in 1981 in Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan, sparks a heated eight-year debate about the function of public art. The work is dismantled in March 1989.

"Artists: 1979-1988" originally appeared in the September 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's September 2009 Table of Contents.