Street art: How graffiti master Keith Haring turned New York into his Canvas
5 min read
By the time Keith Haring died at the age of 31, he had become one of the world’s most famous artists, his work adorning gallery walls, New York streets and merchandise of all kinds. William Cook has opened the first major UK retrospective of Haring at Tate Liverpool, exploring the artist’s creative life.It’s been nearly 30 years since Keith Haring died of AIDS at the age of 31, but his joyous street art is as well recognized and sought after as ever, even for those who have never been inside an art gallery or even heard his name. Haring broke down the divide between high art and street art by bringing street art into galleries and fine art into the street. He turned the subway station into an art gallery, and the gallery into a nightclub. In the UK, where he has inspired countless artists and even influenced rave culture and Acid House, there has never been a retrospective of him to this day.
The Keith Haring exhibition, a breakthrough for Tate Liverpool, will travel to Bozal in Brussels and the King of Folklore Museum in Essen. Merseyside, with its musical traditions and lively street life, feels like the perfect venue for Haring’s work. His short but prolific career revolved around New York. Bravery and irreverence are his themes, and Liverpool is a city of that style.
Haring was born in 1958 in Reading, Pennsylvania, the oldest of four children. His parents were kind and traditional. His mother was a homemaker and his father worked for AT&T. It was a comfortable, conservative and cultured home environment, a model of the kind of home that fits the American dream. As a child, Haring loved to draw cartoons with his father, which is how he maintained this bold and simple style throughout his life. A visit to the Heshorn Museum in Washington, D.C. as a teenager was an important source of inspiration. He saw some of Andy Warhol’s work and decided to become an artist. Haring took his parents’ advice and went to Art College in Pittsburgh to study graphic design, but he soon realized that he wanted to be a good artist, not a commercial one. He abandoned this vocational course and developed his own unique style, inspired by artists such as Clay and Dubuffet, and had his first one-man show in a Pittsburgh gallery at the age of 19.
When he was 20, Haring moved to New York and studied at the New York School of Visual Arts. “The main attraction here is the city. It’s the only thing that gets me excited, “he says. After a few semesters, he abandoned his studies at the SVA and turned his attention to a bigger canvas: the streets and subway walls of New York City.
The New York of 1979 is very different from the New York of 2019. At the time, the city was depressed, decayed and dangerous, but like Berlin during the war, this also made it an active place for artists. Apartments, studios and galleries rent cheaply, and the city is full of creative young people who don’t mind crime and squalor. Haring made his home in Greenwich Village, the roughest and most Bohemian part of New York City at the time.
What sets Haring apart from other artists is that he makes direct contact with the city and its inhabitants. Instead of confining his work to galleries, he works like a street graffiti artist, leaving his iconic designs in public places all over the city, just as the enigmatic street artist Banksy did in Britain, “where the viewer interacts with my work and what it makes them think, It’s bigger than my work itself.”
Haring’s street art made him famous, and he was invited to exhibit in prestigious galleries, but even in these traditional Spaces, he adopted an unconventional approach to exhibition. Instead of simply hanging pictures on the walls, he painted them on the walls, floor and ceiling. He works with famous DJS and shows in nightclubs as much as he does in galleries. His stirring paintings capture the frenetic energy of dance music. He hung out with hip young artists like Jean Michel Basquiat, so he was equally familiar with the club scene.
New York’s thriving gay underground is also part of what made the city so special during this time. For Haring, New York was also a place where he could freely express his sexuality. He lived a liberated life, and this feeling of liberation is reflected in his paintings. “The sexual energy is probably the strongest impulse I’ve ever felt, far beyond the artistic impulse.” ‘he said. His art was not restricted by homosexuality, but it gave his work a universal appeal. Haring’s artistic image is both easy to enjoy and easy to understand, without boundaries. He is also very popular in Japan. He was also popular throughout Europe. He painted walls in Berlin, his art was sexy and accessible in the 1980s, and he opened Pop Shops in New York and Tokyo. His distinctive images of babies and barking dogs are printed on all kinds of merchandise. Like his idol, pop art guru Andy Warhol, he has no qualm about commercial branding of his art.
Political activism played a key role in Haring’s artistic creation. He was forced to speak for his own generation, and his work responded to many of the popular issues of the 1980s. His “crack is wack” mural, which focused on drug addiction and New York City’s crack cocaine epidemic, is now a monumental landmark. He spoke out against racism and apartheid by painting a black silhouetted man trampling on a white silhouetted man with a noose around his neck on a freedom poster in South Africa. He used posters promoting safe sex to encourage awareness and prevention of AIDS, and in 1982, at an anti-nuclear rally, he produced 20,000 posters for free distribution.
By the time Haring was 30, he had become one of the most famous artists in the world, but in 1988, he discovered that he had HIV. Today, with the right treatment, his condition could be completely controlled, but back then, it was a death sentence. Haring knew he only had a short time to live, but he was at peace with death.” “I had just come out and it was a wild time for everyone,” he said. “If I didn’t get sick, no one would, so I knew it was only a matter of time before I knew.” Haring’s last years were his most productive. Some of his later works were darker and more complex, but he never lost his joie de vivre. He died in 1990, six weeks before the new decade. “Living with a deadly disease gives you a whole new outlook on life,” he says. I knew from a young age that I would die sooner than the average person, but I thought it would be a quick process, an accident, not an illness. I live every day like it’s my last, and I still love life”.
