Last update:
April 10th
2001

the living room heart

corner Keith Haring -- 1985 - 1986 corner
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In 1985 Keith began paintings on canvas. Simultaneously he exhibited paintings at Tony Shafrazi Gallery and brightly colored painted steel sculptures at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York City. He held a solo exhibition at the Musèe d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux. He participated in the Paris Biennial. Then designed sets for Sweet Saturday Night, Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; and the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, for the Ballet National de Marseille, France. He painted a 7.50 * 9.50 m backdrop for the Palladium, New York City. He printed and distributed 20,000 free South Africa posters. He also designed four watches for Swatch USA.

He also created a mural and distributed free T-shirts and balloons for Keith Haring Day at Children's Village, Dobbs Ferry, New York, painted a mural on handball court, P.S. 97, New York and he also painted St. Patrick's Daycare Center in San Francisco.

One of his friends was the artist Roy Lichtenstein, who said about Keith's work, "When Keith finishes a piece, there's nothing you could think of that you'd want to change. Even if he did something all at once - without standing back and changing anything - there just isn't a false move. It's all beautifully drawn - and there's such a sense of relatedness. The stuff is beautiful!"

Yoko Ono, the widow of John Lennon, said about Keith, "He always stood outside the art world, because his art is the people's art. In that way, he is like a record producer of pop music - of groups whose songs reach out to the people. John Lennon did that, and the Beatles did that in the sixties. Keith is doing exactly the same thing, and that's why he communicates on such a big level."

In 1986 Keith stopped doing subway drawings. He held a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Then he executed three large-scale sculptures temporarily installed at Hammarskjold Plaza, New York City.

In April 1986, Keith made his art available over-the-counter when he opened the Pop Shop, a retail store on Lafayette Street in Manhattan's SoHo district in New York. Here Keith Haring T-shirts, caps, buttons, prints, inflatable babies, and many other Haring-designed products and multiples would be sold.

pop shoppop shop

This was a very bold step, because it lay Keith open to charges of having sold out and becoming commercial. But following the advice and encouragement of his friend, Andy Warhol, Keith went through with the idea. He explains his philosophy in selling his art through a commercial venue:

"I wanted to continue the same sort of communication as with the subway drawings. With the Pop Shop I wanted to attract the same wide range of people, and I wanted it to be a place where not only collectors could come, but also kids from all over and everywhere.

"My work was starting to become more expensive and more popular within the art market. Those prices meant that only people who could afford big art prices could have access to the work. The Pop Shop makes it accessible.

"I could have made more money if I just painted fewer things and jacked up the price. But my shop is an extension of what I was doing in the subway stations, breaking down the barriers between high and low art."

Before, during and after the opening of the Pop Shop, Keith was dogged by a critical ambivalence towards his work, stemming from its broad popularity.

"It's frightening how much power critics and curators have. People like that have enough power to write you out of history...

"...I think that in a way some [critics] are insulted because I didn't need them. Even [with] the subway drawings I didn't go through any of the 'proper channels' and succeeded in going directly to the public and finding my own audience...I bypassed them and found my public without them. They didn't have the chance to take credit for what I did. They think that they have the role of finding the artist...and then teaching the public....I sort of stepped on some toes...

"I think public sculpture should aggressively alter our perception of the environment in a positive way. People love to interact with sculptures by climbing, sitting, touching and moving. For me, the most effective public sculpture would function as visual and physical entertainment. I think public art (unless there is a specific political or ideological message) should make people feel comfortable, and brighten their environment. These sculptures were designed to be played on... a kind of 'adult-scale' playground. "

In whatever part of the world Keith found himself and no matter what honors came to him, he would always insist that children be a part of his appearances. He set up workshops with them and always made sure that everyone had a lot of fun. He painted the Crack is Wack mural in New York City as well as an outdoor mural in Amsterdam; a mural at Jouets & Cie toy store, in Paris; and Phoenix, Arizona. He body-painted Grace Jones for her video "I'm not perfect". He collaborated with Brian Gysin on Fault Lines and with Jenny Holzer on billboards for Vienna Festival '86.

crack is wack

"What I like about children is their imagination," he said. "It's a combination of honesty and freedom they seem to have in expressing whatever is on their minds. So, whenever I could, I did projects with kids.

"There's one I did as often as possible: I rolled out this big roll of paper. All the children sat around it. I'd do some drawings with markers or pens. I'd have music going and, as in 'musical chairs,' when the music stopped everyone moved to another part of the paper. When the music started, everyone continued to draw. It was a way of filling the paper in an interesting way. I've done this project in Japan, all over Europe and America - and it worked every time. It never got boring."

He created a mural for Club DV8, San Francisco and painted permanent murals at Woodhull Hospital, Brooklyn, New York. Keith then collaborated on an outdoor mural with schoolchildren in Phoenix, on Washington and Adams Streets.

Keith also literally integrated the public into his work; for instance, he collaborated on a number of community projects with inner-city youth. For the centennial anniversary of the Statue of Liberty (1986), Haring and one thousand children painted a ten-story banner.

"The things that have always given me the strength and confidence not to worry about [negative criticism] are, first of all, support from other artists, artists whom I look up to and respect much more than I respect these critics or curators, and second, things that come from real people, people who don't have any art background, who aren't part of the elitist establishment or of the intellectual community but who respond with complete honesty from deep down inside their hearts or their souls."

Gaining more and more attention and success, Keith began to expand his creative horizons by painting major on-site murals all over the world and designing large-scale outdoor sculptures that resembled huge, brightly colored children's toys. Two great honors came to Keith when, at the age of 27, he was invited to show the entire range of his work - from 1980 to 1985 - at the Bordeaux Contemporary Art Museum in France and at the Stedelijk Museum in the Netherlands.

Nothing in Keith's life was boring either. He loved to party and loved to surround himself with lots of talented and beautiful people, many of whom had a great appreciation for his work. One of these was Madonna, whom Keith met when they were both just starting out in the East Village.

"We were two odd birds in the same environment," remembered Madonna. "I watched Keith come up from that street base, which is where I also came up from. I've always responded to Keith's art. From the very beginning there was a lot of innocence and a joy that was coupled with a brutal awareness of the world. The fact is, there's a lot of irony in Keith's work, just as there's a lot of irony in my work. And that's what attracts me to his stuff. I mean, you have these bold colors and those childlike figures and a lot of babies, but if you really look at those works closely, they're really very powerful and really scary."

Always in 1986, at the invitation of the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in West Berlin, he painted a portion of the Berlin Wall.

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All Haring images © Estate Of Keith Haring

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