Towards the end of Radiant: Haring, Brad Gooch’s exhaustive new biography, he cites an excerpt from a diary entry Keith Haring made after visiting the Museum of Modern Art in 1988, expressing the “sense of injustice” that contemporaries was “represented up in the galleries, while he was confined to the lobby gift shop: “They haven’t shown one of my works yet. In their eyes I don’t exist”.
Haring’s frustration certainly seems surprising to anyone familiar with his work, which is mostly everyone. You don’t need to be able to name a Keith Haring painting to recognize it – its vibrating line and electric palette announce themselves as effectively as a neon sign.
This was true by 1988, when Haring had completed more than 50 murals around the world, mostly for hospitals and children’s charities, and was designing Swatch watches and ads for Absolut vodka and Run DMC. And it is even more true now, 34 years after his death in 1990 at the age of 31, as his work continues to permeate contemporary art.
At once modern and classic, suggestive yet immediately clear, Haring’s work distills the Pop Art of previous decades and the Neo-Expressionism of the 1980s, wrapping suburban graffiti movements into a genderless and raceless utopia
Haring’s democratic view of art
In his short but intense career, Haring’s pulsing figures became an integral part of New York life, like ancient hieroglyphs that were not drawn but revealed. The remnants of his public works, such as the crimson “Crack is Wack” mural on the handball court in East Harlem from 1986 and the 700-foot wraparound frieze at Woodhull Medical Center done the same year, remain highly visible.
At once modern and classic, suggestive yet immediately clear, Haring’s work distills the Pop Art of previous decades and the Neo-Expressionism of the 1980s, wrapping suburban graffiti movements into a genderless and raceless utopia – a key but expansive vision of human equality. And yet, the most likely place you’ll find it now is still not the museum, but the mall, which was purely his work.
Haring’s view was that art should be available to as many people as possible, and he correctly recognized that most people’s exposure to it was not in galleries but on the street and in shops.
See Keith Haring in action
When he made his own way
Today, the range of artist-branded merchandise – the trinkets and T-shirts that act as an affordable counterpart to the billion-dollar art market machine – is nothing short of remarkable. But the spasms caused by the 1986 opening of Haring’s Pop Shop, a SoHo store that sold cheap memorabilia of his energetic vocabulary—pins, stickers, posters of smiling penises encouraging safe sex—were furious.
Critics saw it as a violation of the sanctity of art. They called him a prostitute and a “disco decorator”. The audacity of an artist who had appeared at the 1983 Whitney Biennial to sell his own cheap reproductions was radical enough to shock.
And they were cheap. Posters went for a dollar, and Radiant Baby buttons – a Haring business card, previously offered for free – sold for just 50 cents extra.
Like so many artists of the 1980s, Haring idolized Warhol, “the cultural parent of all,” as Rene Ricard wrote in 1981
He was displeased
Haring was 27 years old and disaffected by the gallery-industrial complex trying to commercialize him, so he did the commercialization himself. “I wanted it to be a place where, yes, not only collectors could come, but kids from the Bronx could come,” he said at the time. “I assumed, after all, that the point of making art is to communicate and contribute to culture.”
A generous reading might see Haring’s venture as an institutional critique—a more cynical view would be somewhat akin to that of the anonymous critic who spray-painted “CAPITALIST” on the facade of the Pop Shop just hours after it opened.
Like so many artists of the 1980s, Haring idolized Warhol, “the cultural parent of all,” as Rene Ricard wrote in 1981. Where Warhol coolly observed the country’s shift toward mass culture, Haring it was devouring her. His father, an amateur cartoonist, had him drawing Mickey Mouse before he was 6 years old. Warhol was particularly impressed with Haring’s buttons – when he referred to Haring as “an advertising agency for himself”, it was the most endorsement he could think of.
Towards the end of his life, as he battled AIDS, his free-floating sculptures turned to activism: political posters advocating nuclear disarmament and anti-apartheid
“I will paint as much as I can for as many people for as long as I can”
Haring is not responsible for the hyper-capitalist functioning of art – it was probably already headed there, accelerated by the money market of the 1980s and the conflation of the purchase of a work of art with its cultural value.
But his career offered another blueprint, for street art. In 1970s and early 1980s New York, subway writers and graffiti artists operated largely on the periphery of the city, outside the center of gravity of the gallery system, until gravity eventually pulled them away. and them inside.
Haring’s style – the stick figures and fluorescent palette – has been alternately described as pop and graffiti.
What Haring took most from graffiti was the goal of maximum exposure, which he recognized as social engagement. “My contribution to the world is my ability to paint. I will paint as much as I can for as many people for as long as I can” he said.
Haring’s art could be understood
Haring’s art reflected the turmoil of the era—the threat of nuclear war and Reagan-era conservatism translated into jittery lines and people irradiated by flying saucers—but also the era’s sexual liberation, perversions, and the excitement of the club scene , which were broadcast via boomboxes and inflated hearts.
Towards the end of his life, as he battled AIDS, his free-floating sculptures turned to activism: political posters advocating nuclear disarmament and anti-apartheid, and humanizing the AIDS epidemic through education and advocacy ACT UP, all with the same unmitigated positivity.
For most viewers, these signs have disappeared. What remains is a simple universality. Like religious art or cave paintings, they deal with elemental ideas: birth, life, fear, death, sex. Haring’s art could be understood because it spoke in the long, rough lines of human life.
*With data from nytimes.com
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