Radiant Baby

THE art world changes with such delirious speed these days that it no longer recognizes itself in what it produced only a decade ago. Consider the case of Keith Haring, that merry pictorial prankster of Manhattan in the Eighties who won fame and fortune by scribbling graffiti all over the Spring Street subway station. Now the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitney, Haring is associated with the East Village scene, whose exuberant populism once embraced everything from the Jetsons to the spray-painted walls of the inner city. And yet the merriment of that cultural movement, with its dazzling club life and its innocent high jinks, has become a faint memory. Ten years later, we are in a time of sober reckoning haunted by thoughts of mortality. Thus the pervasive mood of the present exhibition is one of sorrow, dominated as it is by the inescapable consciousness of the artist’s death from AIDS seven years ago at age 31. Indeed, it is this element of suffering which alone grants to him one last breath of relevance in an art world that has otherwise rejected completely everything for which he stood.

Haring is unique among younger artists in having achieved the kind of popularity that is granted to few “high” artists, among them Dali, Warhol, and Lichtenstein. Though he is not exactly a household name, his broad-stroked, demotic style of drawing is immediately recognizable and has appeared in everything from UNICEF posters to a recent car commercial. With this single implement of broad and uninflected line, Haring recorded some of the most evocative archetypes of the post-modern mind: a radiant child, a barking dog, a pulsating pyramid.

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James Gardner

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THE art world changes with such delirious speed these days that it no longer recognizes itself in what it produced only a decade ago. Consider the case of Keith Haring, that merry pictorial prankster of Manhattan in the Eighties who won fame and fortune by scribbling graffiti all over the Spring Street subway station. Now the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitney, Haring is associated with the East Village scene, whose exuberant populism once embraced everything from the Jetsons to the spray-painted walls of the inner city. And yet the merriment of that cultural movement, with its dazzling club life and its innocent high jinks, has become a faint memory. Ten years later, we are in a time of sober reckoning haunted by thoughts of mortality. Thus the pervasive mood of the present exhibition is one of sorrow, dominated as it is by the inescapable consciousness of the artist’s death from AIDS seven years ago at age 31. Indeed, it is this element of suffering which alone grants to him one last breath of relevance in an art world that has otherwise rejected completely everything for which he stood.

Haring is unique among younger artists in having achieved the kind of popularity that is granted to few “high” artists, among them Dali, Warhol, and Lichtenstein. Though he is not exactly a household name, his broad-stroked, demotic style of drawing is immediately recognizable and has appeared in everything from UNICEF posters to a recent car commercial. With this single implement of broad and uninflected line, Haring recorded some of the most evocative archetypes of the post-modern mind: a radiant child, a barking dog, a pulsating pyramid.