Smoked and Uncut - Lime Wood

On May 4th this year, visitors
to Google – in other words,
almost every computer user
on the planet – would have seen,
in place of Google’s normal logo,
a series of exuberantly colourful,
cartoon-like men.
The artist for whom this was the
most modern of accolades, Keith
Haring, did not live long enough
to witness the global spread of the
Internet: he died in 1990, aged just
31. He would have appreciated
the tribute, though: Haring was an
artist who rose to fame in the New
York street art scene, and had little
time for the cliquey, stuffy world
of art galleries and private views.
The Google Doodle is the logical
extension of his quest to make art
available to the many, not the few.
He described it as “breaking down
the barriers between high and
low art.”
Haring was born in Reading,
Pennsylvania, on May 4th, 1958.
The young Haring briefly studied
commercial art in Pittsburgh before
deciding on Fine Art, moving to
New York when he was 19 and
enrolling at the School of Visual
Arts. As he puts it in the first lines
of The Universe of Keith Haring,
Christina Clausen’s exhaustive and
fascinating 2008 documentary,
“I was in exactly the right place
at exactly the right time.”
Influenced by the graffiti around
him, Haring’s first forays into pop art
were chalk drawings on the blank,
black spaces awaiting advertisements
on the New York subway: “Radiant
Baby”, a crawling infant surrounded
by a starburst of lines, was an
early motif.
His drawings chimed neatly both
with the Warhol-influenced street
art scene and with the emerging
dance and street music scene of the
early 1980s: it was Warhol, in fact,
who helped Haring develop his art
further, later encouraging him to
open his SoHo boutique, Pop Shop,
in 1986. On sale were Haring’s
thoughtful, cheerful designs in a
huge variety of formats: everything
from key fobs to badges, posters to
Untitled, 1982 © Keith Haring Foundation Used by permission
Self-portrait Polaroid, circa 1980 © Keith Haring Foundation Used by permission
toys. His simple, life-affirming art
was open to all; as he said himself,
it was a place where “not only
collectors could come, but also
kids from the Bronx.”
As Haring’s fame grew, commissions
started to arrive from all over the
world, often for large murals: the
mural at Collingwood College in
Victoria, Australia, for instance,
painted with the help of local
children in 1984. Over the next four
years, he worked in Rio de Janeiro,
Minneapolis, Manhattan and Paris,
painted a mural on the Berlin Wall,
and held exhibitions in Antwerp,
Helsinki and Bordeaux. Bordeaux
was the source of another honour,
too: in 1988, Haring joined the
select group of artists (including
Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali, Pablo
Picasso and Andy Warhol) who
have been asked to design the label
for Château Mouton Rothschild.
His unique fusion of art and pop
continued, too: designing a jacket
for Madonna, painting Grace Jones’s
body for her music video “I’m Not
Perfect”, and painting the set for
an MTV programme hosted by his
friend Nick Rhodes, of
Duran Duran.
Haring’s art was always fun, but
never trivial. From 1986 onwards,
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his work started to reflect social
issues more strongly; in particular,
the menace of crack cocaine, the
anti-apartheid struggle in South
Africa, and the AIDS epidemic.
Openly gay, Haring was a keen
promoter of the “safe sex” message:
in 1988, however, he was himself
diagnosed with HIV. The following
year saw the launch of the Keith
Haring Foundation, established by
Haring to raise funds through the
licensing of his images, with the
proceeds to be spent on activism and
awareness-raising programmes about
HIV and AIDS, and on programmes
to help disadvantaged children.
Haring died the following year, but
his philanthropic work continues
to this day: you can even visit the
virtual Pop Shop – the original
shop closed in 2005 – at
www.haring.com and buy
Haring-designed merchandise from
fridge magnets to condoms. The
Foundation also loans his works to
exhibitions around the world, as
well as continuing to fund projects
related to children and AIDS, and
new generations will no doubt
discover the ebullient, accessible,
colourful art of Keith Haring just as,
forty years ago, passengers on the
New York subway saw his whimsical
drawings and smiled.