Keith Haring
American, 1958-1990
As one of the leading American artists of the twentieth century, Keith Haring forged a unique visual language of bold, energetic lines articulating simplified forms. Born in 1958 in Reading, Pennsylvania, he showed a fascination with drawing from childhood, shaped in his early years by the work of cartoonists and animators, before discovering the more transformative currents of American Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, movements that would lay the foundation for everything he and his generation would go on to achieve. After graduating from high school in 1976, Haring studied at the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh, and in 1978 enrolled as a scholarship student at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where the influence of Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and the Conceptualists began to shape the abstract foundations of what would become his signature style.
New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a city in transformation; devastated by economic crisis yet electric with creative energy. The rise of hip-hop, disco, and house music, along with the explosion of club culture, gave the city a restless and rhythmic vitality that found its way directly into Haring's work. Studying at the School of Visual Arts opened his eyes to a thriving alternative art scene, and he began to develop his unique approach to public art, honing his signature style on the streets, in the subways, and in the underground clubs and creative spaces of the city. In 1980, Haring noticed unused advertising panels in New York subway stations covered with matte black paper, and began to draw on them in chalk. As he later recalled, 'I kept seeing more and more of these black spaces, and I drew on them whenever I saw one. Because they were so fragile, people left them alone and respected them; they didn't rub them out or try to mess them up. It gave them this other power. It was this chalk-white fragile thing in the middle of all this power and tension and violence that the subway was. People were completely enthralled.' Part drawing, part performance, the subway works were populated with the barking dogs, radiant babies, and dancing figures that would define his visual lexicon, and sparked a visceral interaction between art, artist and public that would become central to Haring's entire practice.
Throughout his career, Haring remained resolute in his commitment to making art accessible to as wide an audience as possible, turning away from the gallery-artist model towards more universal, everyday platforms. He was greatly inspired by Andy Warhol's Pop fusion of art and life, and he and Jean-Michel Basquiat became figureheads of an urban art movement that continues to exert a dominant force on the contemporary art market today. Warhol became an important mentor to both Haring and Basquiat in the early 1980s, and the relationship deepened through collaborative projects with influential cultural figures including Grace Jones, Jenny Holzer, and William Burroughs. A hugely successful exhibition at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in 1982 established Haring's name among the New York avant-garde, followed by international recognition. He participated in the Venice Biennale in 1984 and Documenta 7 in Kassel, Germany, in 1982, exhibiting alongside Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Basquiat, and Warhol, and received prestigious public commissions in cities across the world, from Australia to Brazil.
In 1986, Haring opened the Pop Shop, a retail space decorated with abstract black-and-white murals, selling posters, T-shirts, and other commercial items bearing his imagery, on Lafayette Street in SoHo, New York. The venture was both a philosophical provocation and a commercial success, and by placing his work in the hands of people who would never set foot in a gallery, Haring extended the democratic reach of his art while radically blurring the line between fine art and commercial design. In a sense, this was a continuation of everything the subway drawings had begun. As Haring said: 'The things that have always given me the strength and confidence not to worry about negative criticism are, first of all, support from other artists, and second, things that come from real people - people who don't have any art background, who aren't part of the elitist establishment, but who respond with complete honesty from deep down inside their hearts or their souls.'
In 1988, Haring was diagnosed HIV-positive. He continued to work with extraordinary productivity and energy throughout the final years of his life, and before his death established the Keith Haring Foundation to support not-for-profit organisations involved in AIDS education, prevention and care, as well as programmes for children. He died of AIDS-related complications on 16 February 1990, aged thirty-one. The curator and writer Gianni Mercurio later described him as a 'true artist of the moment'. Haring's work remains among the most immediately recognisable and widely beloved in modern art, held in major museum collections around the world and as alive in the cultural consciousness today as it was on the walls of the New York subway.
