Keith Haring Essay Research Paper Keith Haring

Keith Haring Essay, Research Paper

Keith Haring was an American painter, whose simple, symbol-like drawings of dogs, babies, and dancing figures brought him to international acclaim during the 1980s. While making art that spoke directly of love, he raged against intolerance and shared the distress about the world around him. He believed art was a tool of communication, and that art has the power to transform lives and enrich the spirit. In a time when pessimism was prominent, Keith Haring played the role of the magical child whose joy seemed to contradict the definite materialism that consumed the art world. Like many young artists, Haring was not at first well understood, although many appreciated him. Now, his iconic style, relaxed nature, and sense of fun made him one of the most beloved artists of his time.

Keith Haring was intensely aware of being a part of a new generation of Americans. Haring wrote, I consider myself a perfect product of the space age not only because I was born in the year that the first man was launched to space, but also because I grew up with Walt Disney cartoons (Sussman 10). His goal was to speak of and for his generation, to create symbols for it, and to display those symbols in places where people could see them and react. He did this by uniting street culture and high art and expanding the legacy of Pop Art. The cartoon style that haring first used as a child and from there built an enterprise of pieces, was animated by the energies of his culture: space travel, nuclear accidents, video games and robotics, disco and rap, sex and drugs.

There are essentially three phases in Keith Haring s short career. Fist, Haring synthesized a street and club art and transformed a unique style of drawing into bold, public, large-scale painting and decoration. Second in his middle phase, he produced paintings that were Pop versions of Neo-Expressionism and also using publicly known cartooning style to create large murals and other works, many of them for children. Finally, in the last years of his life, he concentrated on summing up his art career while also acting out against his imminent death. (Sussman 13)

Haring s work was almost fully developed by the young age of twenty when he left Pittsburgh for New York. Raised in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, Haring, the oldest of four children, had been encouraged to draw by his father. From the hours when father and son drew imitations of the things they saw together, cartoons and children s book illustrations; Haring developed his unique style (Haring.com). He later went to the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center to study commercial-art but soon dropped out for two reasons. One, the people that he encountered at school were unhappy being illustrators and had lost their own pride for art and their personal art all together (Haring.com). Two, after hearing Christo lecture about his large-scale environmental art projects, Haring was inspired to begin creating art for public spaces (Encarta). In 1978 he moved to New York City, where he attended classes at the School of Visual Arts. Here he was exposed to theoretical studies and to video performance art. In one of his classes, Haring made a video focusing on his own body especially his genitals; this was the beginning of his obsession with phallic shapes (Sussman 12). These pieces however are not as readily seen today. Most examples of Keith Haring work that one would see is his unisex figures, such as the crawling baby or his cartoon drawings, even though a great deal of his work addressed his own sexuality and other sexual themes, such as masturbation and bestiality (Image one).

Haring became interested in the look of hard-edged black lines he saw in the graffiti on subways and subsequently surrounded himself with a group of graffiti kids, like Jean-Michael Basquiat, who were gaining acceptance in the local galleries. He also was influenced by artists that showed their work in alternative spaces, such as Jenny Holzer. From these two influences some of Haring’s most famous public works were formed. First, while riding the subway home one night, Haring noticed the large black space between the advertisements, and so he decided that it was the perfect space to display his artwork. The chalk drawing in the subway used images such as the barking dog, flying saucers emitting lightning bolts, and his so-called radiant baby (a faceless baby surrounded by radiating lines) which later became his signature (Image two). Since his graffiti was accessible to everyone who rode the subway, it created a sense of identity for those who took the time to enjoy it. Henry Geldzahler, an art critic, once said that, Keith Haring s work appeals to us on several levels. First, of course, is the goofy cheerfulness that strikes immediately and, through repetition, becomes a leitmotif that sees us through our days a tuneful celebration of urban commonality (UNC.com). While these drawings made Haring famous, he also was arrested repeatedly for criminal mischief. Secondly, he walked the streets and attached pieces of paper to walls, or billboards, then photographed what he had done to be displayed. For example, he altered an existing street ad for a company called Chardon to read hardon. He would also take existing print and past them together to create new text, such as Reagan Slain by Hero Cop (Sussman 12) & (Image three). Meanwhile, Haring also created work for upscal