In the 1980s, the Austrian artist André Heller had a dream: to bring contemporary art to the masses through an amusement park. He called his dream Luna Luna, after the famed Coney Island destination Luna Park, and in the summer of 1987 it briefly became a reality, welcoming 250,000 visitors inside Moorweide park in Hamburg, Germany.
Heller assembled an almost impossibly brilliant line up of artists. Salvador Dalí designed a mirrored fun house, Jean-Michel Basquiat a ferris wheel, Roy Lichtenstein a labyrinth, David Hockney a wooden pavilion. Joseph Beuys, for good measure, provided a short manifesto (though he would die before the amusement park opened).
The attraction was due to travel onto Vienna and beyond, but limited funding landed Heller in considerable debt. By 1990, he had sold most everything connected with the project to an American nonprofit which duly stuck the rides, installations, and artsy trimmings in shipping containers in the Texan desert for 35 years.
Aerial view of Luna Luna, Hamburg, Germany, 1987
Five years ago, the rapper Drake heard about the mythical amusement park and has since invested $100 million to restore and resurrect Luna Luna through his entertainment company DreamCrew; Live Nation, the entertainment giant, is providing production know-how. In January, “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy” opened to the public in a 60,000-square-feet warehouse in Los Angeles.
On November 20, the amusement park will open at The Shed in New York, for the second leg of an impending global tour. To coincide with Luna Luna’s reemergence, the auction house Bonhams is presenting a set of four felt-tip pen drawings that Keith Haring made for the amusement park’s banners at its 20th/21st Century Art Evening Sale on November 20.
The Luna Luna drawings by Keith Haring. Photo: courtesy Bonhams.
Like Heller, Haring wanted art to be for everyone and had long made inclusivity and simplicity part of his practice. Luna Luna offered him the chance, one he would repeat in the New York Pop Shop. The Luna Luna drawings were made in 1986 and have been given a pre-sale estimate of $300,000 to $400,000.
Spread across four sheets of graph paper, each 10 by 22 inches, the drawings served as blueprints for the colorful banners that were placed around Luna Luna (though Haring also created a merry-go-round). Lettered A through H, the drawings are filled with the bold, graphic characters for which Haring is known. The motifs of radiant baby, barking dog, three-eyed monster, and television man are all intricately interwoven in black and white pen.
“A” and “B” from Keith Haring’s Luna Luna banner drawings. Photo: courtesy Bonhams.
“This represents an extraordinary chance to own a piece of this iconic fair, which has been re-envisioned this year, taking the nation by storm and stepping back into the limelight,” said Andrew Huber, head of 20th/21st-century art at Bonhams in New York. “It also offers an intriguing glimpse into the 1987 production, where Haring worked intimately with fellow artists to democratize art.”