Keith Haring, “Radiant Vision”

by Liz Goldner Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, California

Exhibition Continues through August 25, 2024

July 20, 2024

(left) Keith Haring, “Subway Drawing,” 1980s, chalk on paper

(right) Keith Haring, “Apocalypse, Introduction,” 1988, silkscreen, edition 30/90

Few contemporary artists’ work and iconography are as ubiquitous as Keith Haring’s. The deceased artist (1958-1990) was the subject of the Broad’s “Art is For Everybody” exhibition last year. While the Broad’s many large drawings, paintings, prints and posters commanded our gaze, the current “Radiant Vision,” with 130 pieces, is more intimate. Featuring Haring’s signature Pop-graffiti style, his recognizable comic-style characters, and his line drawings, the exhibition is a guided tour of the single decade career of the joyous and obsessively creative and socially conscious artist.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is the “Subway Drawings” (1980s), which were featured in a 1982 CBS Evening News video. This film follows the bespectacled artist through New York City’s subway stations as he approaches black billboards on which he rapidly draws his iconic radiant babies, spaceships and breakdancing figures with white chalk. He was combining drawing with performance art, entertainment for subway riders and his personal form of marketing. That same year he would also first appear at the quinquennial Documenta show in Kassel, Germany, and had his first major gallery exhibition at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York. The eighties, especially in New York City, was a time of uninhibited flamboyance, and Haring rapidly became one of its chief proponents.

Keith Haring, “Self-Portrait,” 1986, silkscreen, edition 7/25. All images courtesy of the Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach

“Radiant Babies” are interspersed throughout this show, in the original “Radiant Baby” (1980), in “Self-Portrait” (1986), featuring Haring’s face, in five “Buddha” drawings (all 1989). In “Crowd of People Hugging” (1989) more than a dozen graffiti-style people are rapturously entwined with and circling each other. While the wall labels do not confirm it, “Crowd” references gay group sex.

Haring’s conceptual lithographs, “The Story of Red and Blue” (1989), a suite of 20 childlike drawings, employs the colors red and blue as the foundation of imaginary animals, faces, and babies. In drawing #19, two large red and blue blobs embrace and kiss each other. The young artist was part of the gay liberation movement that started in the late 1960s, but was traumatized by the AIDS epidemic that came to public attention by 1982, just as Haring’s career was taking off.

Keith Haring, “Best Buddies Sculpture,” 1989, enamel coated steel, edition 1/25

There are several more serious pieces and series here. The “Apocalypse” series (1988) of 10 silkscreened drawings, accompanied by a text by William S. Burroughs, is one of the show’s most intense and dystopian pieces. The kinetic, colorful drawings, expressions of life’s travails, include four besmirched “Mona Lisas,” tree-like images seemingly on fire, tear drops, large insects, and horned mechanized creatures. The introductory text by Burroughs reads in part, “Mariners sailing close to the shores of Tuscany heard a voice cry out from the hills, the trees and the sky: ‘The Great God Pan is dead!’ Pan, God of Panic.”

The socially conscious Haring was not shy about expressing his political beliefs in his drawings. Among the most dramatic here is his “Free South Africa Suite” (1985), supporting the anti-apartheid movement, with three large aquatints on paper. In each piece, he depicts a black figure, shaped similarly to the radiant babies, struggling to free itself from the white supremacist's noose, with each noose containing a large lock at the end.

Keith Haring, “Free South Africa,” 1985, aquatint on paper, edition HC of 60

The artist’s “Bad Boys Suite” (1986) of six silkscreen drawings, was equally political, although with the perspective of a gay man. These semi-abstract pieces, illustrating groups of nude men in a variety of erotic poses, were meant to depict sex as liberation rather than titillation. And while Haring believed that sex was art and art was sex, he never included these drawings in public commissions.

Like his friend Andy Warhol, Haring was fascinated by celebrities. His large “Poster featuring Brook Shields” (1985), subtitled “Brooke Shields by Richard Avedon and Keith Haring,” is an apparently nude portrait of Shields with a large pink smiling heart covering her genitals. The artist also created album covers, such as “Elton John album with art by Keith Haring” (1985) and “David Bowie and Sylvester Singles” (1986-1987).

Keith Haring, “Poster featuring Brooke Shields: Brooke Shields by Richard Avedon and Keith Haring,” 1985, offset print

Haring did more than draw. His “Best Buddies Sculpture” (1989), of enamel coated steel, features two radiant baby-styled characters interacting humanely, although not sexually. This piece was created for the non-profit “Best Buddies,” founded by Anthony Shriver (JFK’s nephew) to end the “social, physical, and economic isolation” of those living with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The piece was commissioned for a fundraiser, with a limited edition print of the composition raising $500,000.

By the time he died in 1990 at age 31, Haring was a major force in the New York art world, blending its downtown counterculture with the uptown art scene. He supported important social causes while fighting for social justice and raising awareness of AIDS through his art. He also self-promoted his brand through partnerships, mass-market products and his own storefront. The continuing interest in Haring’s art more than 30 years later lends testimony to how his initial burst of joyous liberation engaged but never gave in to the despair of the epidemic. “Radiant Vision” confirms it.

Liz Goldner is an award-winning art writer based in Laguna Beach. She has contributed to the LA Times, LA Weekly, KCET Artbound, Artillery, AICA-USA Magazine, Orange County Register, Art Ltd. and several other print and online publications. She has written reviews for ArtScene and Visual Art Source since 2009. 

Liz Goldner’s Website