The Harings were loving, but Keith had a strong sense that he was different. His dad, Allen, was a church-going, Nixon-supporting Republican, who drew cartoons in his spare time and encouraged his son to do the same.
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He grew up in a conventional family, led by a respectable man, in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. New York was still New York, but grubby, dangerous, abandoned, cheap. The time in which these artists lived and worked seems so near, and yet so far away. In 2017, there was a huge and highly successful Basquiat exhibition, in London around the same time, MoMA in New York put on a show based around Club 57, a small nightclub where artists and musicians and performers would hang out in the late 70s and early 80s. Last year, the Beastie Boys, native New Yorkers, used their vastly entertaining memoir to paint a seductive picture of growing up during that era. The sale price was over £4m.Īnd there’s a renewed interest in the artistic era in which Haring operated – that collaborative time in New York where pop and rap and art met and mixed, a time that started in the mid-to-late 70s and ended, in essence, with a trio of deaths: first Warhol in 1987, then Basquiat in 1988 and finally, Haring, in February 1990. In 2016, Sotheby’s sold four Haring canvases, including the wonderful The Last Rainforest, which he painted in 1989 when he knew he was dying. Today, though, Haring paintings sell for millions. Plus, he collaborated with others too often he was too commercial he would keep banging on about politics and safe sex. There was a sense among the stuffy that these young artists were not to be taken seriously, and Haring’s likable painting style meant that his art, though loved by the public, was not “high” enough for the elite. Neither did critics: some were supportive, many were snide ( Time’s Robert Hughes caricatured Haring as “Keith Boring”).
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They grabbed attention, shows and sales.īut art institutions, especially museums, didn’t know how to react to these upstarts and their work. A new post-Warhol crew that included Haring, Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat suddenly emerged, making work that referenced what was around them: clubbing, rap, street art, television, high and low culture.
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Back then, young artists reacted, shaking up the art establishment. The Reaganite 1980s have parallels with today, with an anti-immigration, anti-union, pro-guns, anti-abortion, go-USA “entertainer” president in the White House. His work is timeless, but it is rooted in its time. Photograph: Collection Noirmontartproduction, Paris. It was playful and fun, with a club vibe. There was music playing and T-shirts hung up. The shop was tiny, with white walls and floor covered in Haring’s art.
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I went there in the 1990s, and it was an all-encompassing experience. Up until 2005, there was his Pop Shop on Lafayette Street in downtown New York. There is public work by Haring in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Antwerp, Berlin, Paris, Melbourne on hospitals, at schools (often made with children), in an LGBT community services centre. There is one at the Carmine public swimming pool on Clarkson Street in Greenwich Village, New York, painted by Haring in one day in 1987. There is a mural in Pisa, on the side of the church of Sant’Antonio, which he made in the last year of his life. In his final few years, he was invited all over the world to make work, and if you want to see some real-life Keith Haring art, you still can.
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Haring lived and worked in New York from 1978 until his death, aged 31, from an Aids-related illness. But it was also a tremendous, beautiful response to the activism of the time… the really unusual thing about Keith is that he felt he could be of service.” “The vernacular of his art was so appealing, with a quality of entertainment. “He was unique,” says Mare169, real name Carlos Rodriguez, a graffiti artist who worked with Haring in the 1980s. “Keith was totally confident, that’s one of the reasons why his art is so strong: the confidence in his line, the conviction, everything about it.” “His line was astonishing,” says artist Kenny Scharf, Haring’s contemporary and friend, of the way Haring drew. Photograph: Richard Levine/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Stock Photo
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Haring’s Crack Is Wack mural, painted in 1986 in Harlem River Park, New York, during restoration.