He knew he had to leave. She thinks it was because she looked different to the other class members, because she was English, with mad curly hair, dressed in secondhand clothes.
They had an instant rapport, she recalls. He really listened. Unlike most year-olds, Haring was clearheaded and motivated; he knew what he wanted to do and he used his time well. He really had it together. When he spotted an unused room in SVA, Haring found some three-metre wide paper, put it on the floor of the room, where it fitted exactly, and started painting in there. He brought in his tape player and painted to Devo, timing the brush-strokes to the music, stopping when the track stopped.
Scharf met him for the first time here, as Haring was literally painting himself into a corner. He and Haring became instant friends. He hung the Devo paintings on the college walls without permission, and from that, got himself an exhibition. Though Haring was confident in his drawing, he was also interested in words, and experimented a lot with poems, as well as new technology like Xerox and video cameras.
For a while, in , he wore a black beret and called himself a terrorist poet. Haring, Scharf and another SVA student called John Sex stumbled across it by mistake; they liked the jukebox and put a track on. Ann Magnuson, who ran the club, came out from behind the bar and started go-go dancing with them.
Everyone was sleeping with everyone else. The chosen drugs were booze and hallucinogens. He did performances with a TV on his head, speaking through the screen. Haring was interested in art that talked to people. So he wanted to gain as many viewers as possible. McEwen remembers him painting abstract images on the ground in the loading bay of SVA. Lots of passersby stopped to talk, to tell him what they thought.
He had turned from poetry back to art, and at the show, he debuted the style that became his signature. He drew pictures of flying saucers shooting out light-rays, of penises being worshipped by crowds of people, of a baby that shone like a star.
Street art was flourishing in New York. Tagging and graffiti art was part of the emerging hip-hop scene, which was mostly based uptown, in Harlem and the Bronx, but moved to the Lower East Side once rappers and taggers like Fab Five Freddy started mingling with downtown artists.
Though Haring, Basquiat and Scharf were very different artists, all three were interested in making work outside galleries. Haring started tagging — he drew his tag, the radiant baby, next to existing graffiti, never over the top — and Basquiat was already doing so.
All three were also interested in the risk and magic of making work without preparatory drawings, and Haring was the king of this. Lenore and Herb Schorr, collectors of both Basquiat and Haring, recall his ability to fill whatever space he needed to.
It was unreal, his understanding. He saw the space and he filled it and it was beautiful and it was balanced, it had a rhythm. Being out and about drawing on walls led Haring to look at the streets differently. In , he made his Soho gallery debut with an immensely popular and highly acclaimed one-man exhibition at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery.
In April , Haring opened the Pop Shop, a retail store in Soho selling T-shirts, toys, posters, buttons and magnets bearing his images.
Haring considered the shop to be an extension of his work and painted the entire interior of the store in an abstract black on white mural, creating a striking and unique retail environment. The shop was intended to allow people greater access to his work, which was now readily available on products at a low cost.
The shop received criticism from many in the art world, however Haring remained committed to his desire to make his artwork available to as wide an audience as possible, and received strong support for his project from friends, fans and mentors including Andy Warhol. Throughout his career, Haring devoted much of his time to public works, which often carried social messages. Haring also held drawing workshops for children in schools and museums in New York, Amsterdam, London, Tokyo and Bordeaux, and produced imagery for many literacy programs and other public service campaigns.
Haring was diagnosed with AIDS in Therefore, their art was historically confrontational, provocative, and illegal by vocation, tending to a uniformity of style as a mark of a particular identity.
Keith Haring is very often associated with graffiti or spray art, but his relationship with those schools is minimal, although there are several points of intersection and they shared the same urban cultural milieu. Haring drew on quite different artistic sources, most of them from within the history of contemporary art Pierre Alechinsky, Jean Dubuffet, Christo, Matisse, action painting.
However, there are other aspects that can be linked to the graffiti movement: the strong sense of belonging to a community, the marked athleticism and dynamism of the execution, the idea that the works should be completed within a contained unit of space and time and more often than not in a single sitting , the counter-cultural inspiration, the continual backdrop of hip-hop and rap, etc.
For Haring, painting was an experience that at its best allowed him to transcend reality, to go somewhere else, completely outside his own ego and self. It is well known that Haring made use of psychedelic drugs. But his roots in counter-culture are clear, too, He had absorbed the art of the cartoon from his father, with whom he used to draw comic strips. But after his father, the most fertile encounter was with William Burroughs, the most radical and maudit spirit of the Beat Generation, direct heir to the post-surrealist tradition by way of his close ties to Brion Gysin.
In the summer of , the writer and painter Gysin had cut newspaper articles into strips, rearranging them at random. Minutes to Go was the result of this first experiment with the cut-up. Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces in his opinion a new dimension into writing, enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation. The work of Gysin and Burroughs reflected not just an attempt to bring out the hidden meaning of things, but also a completely radical approach towards technology and, last but not least, a sincere interest in North African cultures.
Throughout the s, Haring's work was exhibited widely both within the United States and internationally. Always wanting to make his art more accessible, Haring opened a retail store called the Pop Shop in New York City's SoHo neighborhood in ; the shop sold posters, T-shirts and other affordable items featuring Haring's signature designs. Over the brief span of his career, the artist completed more than 50 public works, including the anti-drug mural Crack is Wack in a Harlem playground and an illuminated, animated billboard of his "radiant baby" image for New York's Times Square.
He also hosted numerous art workshops for children. The following year, he created the Keith Haring Foundation to support children's programs and organizations dedicated to raising AIDS awareness. He was 31 years old. Haring's art, with its deceptively simple style and its deeper themes of love, death, war and social harmony, continues to appeal strongly to viewers.
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