If you lived in New York City in the early 80s, and if you traveled on the subway system or walked the streets of downtown Manhattan, especially in the Village area, you probably came across ‘graffiti’ that looked something like the above picture. You might have been struck by the work without having any idea who made it. These days, forty years later, anyone at all familiar with contemporary art can identify the work as having been made by Keith Haring. That, in itself, is notable. How could artwork so simple have such a definite sense of style? The drawings and paintings are composed of just a few human figures created by means of thick black lines and nothing else. But there is something about the poses, the sense of movement that is undeniably Keith Haring.
Haring became a massive figure in the NYC artworld in the 80s. Not long before that he was just a small town kid from Reading and then Kutztown, Pennsylvania who came to NYC in 1978 to attend The School of Visual Arts. Within a few years, he was hanging out with Andy Warhol, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and all the other famous and infamous figures peopling the downtown New York scene in those days. He went from giving out free stickers on the subways to selling his art in the six figures. And then, almost before it had started he was dead, succumbing to the AIDS epidemic that also swept through the NYC art scene at that time. Haring died on February 16, 1990.
The story of Keith Haring’s meteoric rise to international art fame is as good as any such story—thrilling really. It is well told in Brad Gooch’s recently published biography of Haring entitled Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring (HarperCollins: 2024). There are some especially fun episodes in the tale. In the early 1980s, Haring was interested in meeting Andy Warhol, who dominated the art scene in lower Manhattan at the time. But Haring was also, and understandably, intimidated by Warhol and nervous about getting his approval. Snap forward a few years and Warhol is writing in his diary that Haring is “the most important artist since Picasso, whether people like it or not, and a lot of them don’t.”
Or there’s the birthday party in 1985, at which point Haring had become a global art world and popular sensation. Boy George volunteered to sing “Happy Birthday” to Haring as a not-yet-twenty-year-old Brooke Shields and Bianca Jagger in a leg cast struggled to get through the massive crowd in order to get into the party. The kid from semi-rural Pennsylvania had become such a sensation that he could invite five thousand people to his own birthday soiree and hold it at The Palladium.
As interesting and fun to read as is the story of Keith Haring’s rise to fame and fortune, it is still an open question as to exactly what it is that Haring accomplished. As Warhol noted in his diary quoted above, a lot of people didn’t like the fact that Haring had become so important and many of those people were the leading critics and curators of that era. Robert Hughes, for instance, liked to call him ‘Keith Boring’. Hilton Kramer, art critic at The New York Times in the early 80s, thought Haring’s work was superficial, overly commercial, and downright simplistic.
And that has been the question about Haring’s art ever since. Is it too populist and too popular to be considered serious art? It’s cool—everyone admits that—and it’s fun. But does anything that is cool and fun and can be found on the streets of downtown NYC have to be considered great art?
The famous and insightful critic (and not necessarily a great fan of Haring) Donald Kuspit tried to sort this problem out in a piece for Artforum back in 1986. Kuspit was reviewing a show at the Tony Shafrazi gallery, which was the gallery that first really put Keith Haring on the map. Gooch quotes Shafrazi in his book as saying, “I identified with Keith’s tremendously pure connection to the source of art, which was coming through him. It wasn’t an acquired thing. He was a vessel.”
Kuspit, in his Artforum review, says something similar, calling Haring fundamentally a “communicator” and a “populist” artist. Kuspit contrasts this, using distinctions grabbed from the art historian Meyer Shapiro, with artists like Van Gogh or Kandinsky who come from a “high art” and “absolute” perspective. Unlike high artists, Kuspit argued, Haring received and transmuted something that was already in the zeitgeist, spitting it back out again to an audience already well-disposed to receive it. That’s why, according to Kuspit, Haring’s images have always felt so familiar. They are transposed from popular imagery and from street styles like graffiti. This is the stuff that the “mind already knows,” as Jasper Johns liked to put it.
One can see what Kuspit means when looking at one of Haring’s Mickey Mouse pieces from the early 80s.
Keith Haring, Untitled (Mickey), Acrylic and gold paint marker on Red plexiglass. 1983.
There is a cartoony feeling to the piece overall. It contains familiar imagery and references, and is easy to digest, visually. Comments that Kuspit made about Haring’s Macho Camacho from 1985 would seem to apply equally to Untitled (Mickey): “Haring seems to say it all, personally as well as publicly, with an admirable brevity. He will take his place alongside the masters of witty illustration.”
But Kuspit also makes a second point, which is that Haring’s populist art has a tendency to incorporate some of the “elegant techniques of high art” like working on a large-scale and creating art that self-consciously acknowledges that “the medium is the message.” The point that Haring blended aspects of “high” and “low” art is a point that Gooch also touches on in his biography. It’s a point that Haring himself seems to have been more or less aware of, even though Haring was not inclined to reading art theory or contemporary criticism. But he did go to art school. And before he ended up in New York City, he saw a show in Pittsburgh featuring the art of Pierre Alechinsky.
Alechinsky is much better known in the French-speaking world to people seriously interested in 20th century art. He is still alive, 96 years old as of the writing of this article. Originally, Alechinsky was from Belgium and associated with the Cobra art group in his early years. Cobra was a short-lived but influential European art movement formed in 1948. The artists rejected traditional aesthetics and embraced spontaneity, bright colors, and distorted figures. They often drew inspiration from children’s art and prehistoric sources. Alechinsky was also enamored of Art Brut, which had similar roots and motivations. But what especially excited Haring about Alechinsky was what he called the “Eastern connection.”
Alechinsky had traveled to Japan in 1955 and then made a film about Japanese calligraphers in 1956. “Here was this guy,” said Haring about Alechinsky’s work, “doing what I was doing, but on a huge scale, and done in the kind of calligraphy I was working with, and there were frames that went back to cartooning–to the whole sequence of cartoons, but done in a totally free and expressive way, which was totally about chance, totally about intuition, totally about spontaneity–and letting the drips in and showing the brush–but big!”
You can see what Haring was talking about in a piece like the following with its thick black lines and the calligraphic, if abstract, nature of the composition:
Pierre Alechinsky, The Ant Hill, oil on canvas (1954)
Or maybe more so in the piece below, at least in terms of the figures and cartoony style:
Pierre Alechinsky, A propos de Binche (1967)
The main thing to notice here is that the Japanese-inspired calligraphic lines in Alechinsky’s work resonated for Haring in exactly the same way that a good cartoon drawing resonates. Here, for instance, is an early Mickey Mouse drawing from the 1930s:
We know that Haring loved this image, and images like it, because he reproduced so many versions of it in his own work, like Untitled (Mickey).
And then there was a third major influence on the development of Haring’s style in the early 1980s. This was his exposure to the graffiti art circulating on the New York City subway trains.
Notice the hard black lines to the lettering, not dissimilar to the hard black lines that Disney used in drawing Mickey Mouse. Hard black lines. This, in essence, is what Haring picked up from Alechinsky, who was influenced by Japanese art and by the Art Brut-type movements of early and mid-century Modernism, and from cartoons and graffiti. But not just the hard black lines. What Haring also loved was the play and the color and the movement and the dynamism of cartoons and graffiti. Hard black lines but put together with something vibrant and exciting and full of motion. As Gooch argues in his book, “Keith Haring was probably among a sharp minority of viewers who saw in the [graffiti] wildstyle the brushwork and spirit of Alechinsky and Dubuffet.” That’s to say, the rawness, freedom, and boldness of what Alechinsky and Dubuffet were doing in a fine art context reminded Haring of exactly that same spirit as he was seeing it in the subway graffiti of 1980s New York.
Of course, hard black lines in and of themselves don’t have that much intrinsic motion. They generally emphasize the opposite. But not when you use them the way graffiti artists in New York City did, or when you use them like this:
Keith Haring, Radiant Baby, print (1990)
This is one of Haring’s radiant babies, of which he made many versions and with many different color combinations. These are thick, hard black lines indeed. But by borrowing a technique to show motion from the cartoon and illustration tradition, Haring also used his hard black lines to create radiance.
This Mickey Mouse cartoon shows just how the ‘radiant lines’ technique migrated from comic strips and cartoons into Haring’s mature art.
Notice how the lines around Mickey and the snake are used to show or emphasize a range of emotions, actions, and reactions. In Haring’s Radiant Baby there is, of course, no particular narrative being conveyed. It’s just a baby, radiating. But the radiation is no less effective for having become abstract. Because babies do kind of radiate. Their simple presence in a room is often enough to create a frisson of excitement. There are cultural and biological reasons for that, no doubt. But Haring was not a sociologist or psychologist. He was simply showing this radiation, using it.
Haring did not apply this technique only to babies, of course. For Haring, everybody in the world seemed to participate, at least to some degree, in this quality of radiating. Witness, for instance, the following:
Keith Haring, Untitled (Dance), 1987
And Haring didn’t apply his radiating technique just to people. Animals often dance and radiate in Haring’s work. And sometimes, the whole planet itself gets in on the act.
Keith Haring, Untitled (World) (1985)
The impact of this work probably has nothing to do with whether it is high art masquerading as low art or low art masquerading as high art. Haring himself never seemed particularly interested in those divisions anyway. He liked Dubuffet and Alechinsky in exactly the same way that he liked cartoons and street graffiti. Pace Kuspit, I don’t think you can say that Haring’s art was fundamentally populist with a dash of high art influence to keep it from getting stale.
Most of the art critics, in short, were getting themselves tied in knots trying to answer a question that never actually applied to what Haring was doing. More interesting, I think, are the raw reactions from the majority of people who were experiencing Haring’s work—that is, the people who stumbled upon Haring’s babies and dogs and weird creatures and UFOs on the walls of New York City. Gooch quotes actress and performance artist Ann Magnuson as saying, “Keith’s subway panels greeted you like welcome mats at each downtown stop. Personalized petroglyphs that spelled relief from the piss-soaked wreckage of the Lower East Side.” Haring himself was often amazed that so few people messed with or defaced his drawings, as happened with so much of the public art and graffiti of the time. Haring noted that “the drawings seemed to have this protective power that prevented people from destroying them.” This power, according to Haring, was a “protective nimbus” that had something to do with the images being a form of “primitive code.”
In that sense, asking whether Haring’s work should qualify as “real art” is like asking whether prehistoric cave paintings are real art. Of course they are real art. They are amazing and mysterious and filled with some kind of aura that is utterly tantalizing, if difficult to describe or explain. And, of course, they are also not real art, in that we don’t even know how to judge them or value them, or call them good or bad, or even be sure why and for what they were made.
In another Artforum essay from 1981 (also referenced in Gooch’s book) written by the poet Rene Ricard, Ricard says about Haring’s Radiant Child that “it looks as if it’s always been there. The greatest thing is to come up with something so good it seems as if it’s always been there, like a proverb.”
Ricard was talking about a timeless and ahistorical quality to art, something that affects and transforms. This quality, it seems, is something that once would have been described as magical. But what other word are we to use when an artist describes his work as having a ‘protective nimbus’ and everyone more or less agrees, even the rough and tumble street artists of 1980s New York City, who were not generally given to letting an outsider make marks on their walls? The graffiti kids of NYC did indeed treat Haring’s work as almost sacred. They showed it respect by leaving it untouched. It was as if they themselves recognized that Haring’s work needed to be in the streets and subway halls of the city. Or even, that it had always been there.
Here, we are talking about a kind of art that is not primarily part of any intellectual lineage or art historical school. Instead, we’re talking about art as it is connected to ancient things like cult worship, ritual, magic. If Keith Haring’s art is good, it is good because it somehow mobilized the familiar, popular imagery of its time in order to create images that feel ancient, timeless, symbolically rich, and powerful.
I’m reminded of Joseph Beuys, who once declared that, when it comes to contemporary art, it is necessary for an enchanter to appear. The enchanter, by definition, is not going to play by the rules of art as laid down by the academy, the market, or the museum.
Keith Haring, Untitled (Snake), 1983.
There is something, for instance, about this image of a snake person that seems like it could have been found on the wall of an ancient Mayan temple, or a mosaic somewhere in the ruins of Minoan Crete. At the same time, the jaunty bounciness of the figures could never be anything but contemporary. It is deeply of its own time and somehow deeply ancient as well. Its magical power seems to have been to affect and alter the mood and tone, as Ann Magnuson noted in the quote above, of a particular place at a particular time. You could also, just maybe, call it the sacred imagery of that apex of urban life at the end of the 20th century, downtown New York City.
It is relevant, then, that Brad Gooch begins and ends his biography of Keith Haring with intensely personal reflections. He writes of his own experience with the street art and graffiti of the late 70s and early 80s “[a]s a poet and fiction writer, also young and living downtown at the time, I found these messages extremely urgent. They were stamped on asphalt sidewalks, taped as announcements to the blank walls of buildings on the Bowery, or spray-painted on the sides of vans and buses rumbling by–all illuminated fitfully by the amber light of dim streetlamps operating at half power.” The special skill of Keith Haring was to transmute that buzz and aura and urgency into images that contained all this energy without killing it. For this he needed his heavy black lines. But he put enough magic into those lines that they still jump and dance to this day. One suspects that the images will continue to do so a hundred years from now, or even a hundred thousand.