Timed to coincide with what would have been the artist's 60th birthday on May 4, the "Keith Haring. The Alphabet" exhibition at Vienna's Albertina Museum shows the enduring appeal of his iconic activist art.
Image: The Keith Haring Foundation
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Art as activism: Keith Haring's political statements
Before his death at the age of 31, Keith Haring had made a name for himself in New York's pop scene for his use of seemingly simplistic drawings and biting political statements. His work is on display in Vienna.
Image: The Keith Haring Foundation
Inspired by hieroglyphs
Impressed by ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Haring adopted their form of communication by developing characters that were reduced to just a few lines. "There is within all forms a basic structure, an indication of the entire object with a minimum of lines, that becomes a symbol," he said in 1978.
Image: The Keith Haring Foundation
The hole left after John Lennon's death
Haring was nothing if not a contemporary artist responding to the pressing issues of the day. With this untitled vinyl painting on tarp, Haring reacted to John Lennon's murder on December 8, 1980. "I woke up the next morning with this image in my head — of the man with a hole in his stomach — and I always associated that image with the death of John Lennon."
Image: The Keith Haring Foundation
Tagging the dog
Although inspired by graffiti artists, Haring did not consider himself one of them. As his work progressed, he created a signature tag: starting with the outline of an animal, the tag began to resemble a dog; later in his work, it rather appeared as a person crawling on all fours.
Image: The Keith Haring Foundation
Love over consumerism with Andy Mouse
Numerous symbols and figures appear repeatedly throughout Haring's work. A simple red heart, signifying love is shown here as a gamble two people take. On the right half of the image is the artist's unique Andy Mouse, a character derived from the Disney figure but tweaked in homage to pop artist Andy Warhol. Context varies, but Andy Mouse is seen as a critique of mass consumerism and pop culture.
Image: The Keith Haring Foundation
The original form of going viral
Haring was a contemporary of Neil Postman, famous for his book "Amusing Ourselves to Death"; both were ahead of their time as critics of the role of TV and computers in our lives. The screen-headed caterpillar shown in this painting from 1983 combines common symbols in Haring's work to delivers his message of warning that machines pose acute danger to people and could spell the end of humanity.
Image: The Keith Haring Foundation
Baring the Cross
Adept at critiquing modern culture through symbols he employed, Haring often showed the cross as a place of death or being used by people to commit murder. The cross seen here can be said to represent evangelical Christianity and the trend toward televangelism that swept the US in the early 1980s. In interviews, the artist warned of the danger of dogmatism and "control religions."
Image: The Keith Haring Foundation
The X-man
Whether you want to interpret the x as the marker of a target or as another letter in the alphabet so frequently used by Haring in his work (and which the exhibition at the Albertina in Vienna is named after), the symbol appears again and again. In this instance, it appears to represent the mob mentality that tears people apart.
Image: The Keith Haring Foundation
Chalk outlines as political statements
Although he died of AIDS at 31, Haring was famous for his politically-driven work even in Europe. He was asked to draw a mural on the Berlin Wall in the late 80s, and painted public service messages, including "Crack is Whack." The turbulence of the 1980s, a decade characterized in the US by the discovery of HIV, military action and the rampant greed of Wall Street, are common themes in his art.
Image: The Keith Haring Foundation
The monkey as Golden Calf
Mixing metaphors, this acrylic painting could be considered an ironic take on the tale of the Golden Calf, here featuring a red monkey worshiped by many. Monkeys are depicted throughout Haring's oeuvre, most remarkably in his work supporting the AIDS advocacy organization ACT UP, which evokes the three wise monkeys from the proverb "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil."
Image: The Keith Haring Foundation
Untitled, Self-Portrait (1985)
Early in his career, Haring sought out opportunities to bring his art to a broader audience — and found it on the empty, black-matted billboards of the early 80s New York subways. Graffiti had already inched into every corner of the city, but Haring took a different approach, using chalk instead of marker to create temporary drawings, similar to this later self-portrait.
Image: The Keith Haring Foundation
Artist at work
Haring used a similar technique to the continuous process employed by Picasso, according to the latter's son, Claude. "He just stayed close, ... painting it from top to bottom — bending on his knees, and never once stepping back to see how it looked. Only after he had covered the entire door did he step back, and that's when the door was finished and became a marvelous painting."
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Grittier, rawer, more industrial: It's hard to imagine the New York City of the late 70s and early 80s from today's perspective. The underground subway cars, laden with graffiti stood in stark contrast to the polished black limousines ferrying the Gordon Geckos along Fifth Avenue. It was that juxtaposition that provided the backdrop for the extraordinary art of Keith Haring.
Developing the 'Haring alphabet'
Born in eastern Pennsylvania, Haring made his way to Manhattan in 1978, enrolling in the School of Visual Arts at the age of 20. Although he did not receive a degree for his studies, his professors included Joseph Kosuth and Simone Forti; the experience and their influence set him on a path to creating art responsive to its time.
Haring began by posting collages in public spaces featuring figures who appeared frequently in newspaper headlines: Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II. He likewise found empty canvases on the unused billboards in subway stations; taking chalk to the black matte background, Haring created the line drawings he would later become best known for.
Early childhood influences like Dr. Seuss and the drawings of Walt Disney helped give these drawings a cartoon-like feel and provided the initial characters that would come to make up Haring's "alphabet" — a unique set of hieroglyphs of sorts.
Keith Haring in 1990, a month before his death; he would have turned 60 on May 4Image: picture-alliance/dpa/Elsner
The politics of Pop Art
It's this symbolism and the characters that repeatedly appear in Haring's work that provide the backbone of an exhibition opening March 16, 2018 at the Albertina Museum in Vienna. On view through June 24, 2018, "Keith Haring. The Alphabet," comprises 100 of the artist's works, from subway art and drawings to sculptures and paintings. The selection focuses on pieces from his oeuvre that deal with social justice issues and transformation, two common threads that run through most of his body of work.
Just two years into his life in New York, Haring had made a name for himself within the lively art and pop culture scene. He considered graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat a close friend. A fashion collaboration with Grace Jones led to Haring painting a unique work on her body. He befriended Andy Warhol, and arrived at Madonna and Sean Penn's wedding in 1985 with the Pop artist on his arm.
Heavily influenced by the trends on the streets of New York, Haring's repertoire referenced unique moments in pop culture. His crudely drawn response to Mickey Mouse, often seen in his work as a criticism of capitalism and mass consumerism, was dubbed Andy Mouse in homage to Warhol.
An homage from one pop artist to another: Andy Warhol as Mickey MouseImage: The Keith Haring Foundation
Perhaps most memorable of his figures were the yellow-colored outlines of people in movement, their arms and legs turned outward or raised to the sky in what looks like break dancing. These dancing characters appear over and over again in drawings, as do variations on a spiky-headed dog, a symbol that some considered Haring's street tag, or signature.
Always interested in social activism, Haring turned a critical eye to subjects that were on everyone's minds in the 1980s: apartheid in South Africa, the Cold War and the military-industrial complex, HIV/AIDS, LGBTQ rights. Although his drawings included no words to reflect his political beliefs, the symbolism Haring employed made transparent his feelings about the subjects: dollar signs representing the greed of the go-go decade or mushroom clouds reflecting the artist's feelings toward nuclear disarmament. These overtly political statements helped the artist garner invitations to create work in cities across Europe, including a mural on the Berlin Wall.
Haring and his Berlin Wall painting in 1986Image: picture-alliance/AP Photo/E. Bruhn-Hoffmann
Deciphering the Keith Haring hieroglyphs
The symbols that appeared in Haring's work reflected the subjects that moved the artist over time. Religious symbols like the cross are drawn to show people dying on them — a reference, likely, to Haring's teenage years spent with the Jesus movement and a response to the growing televangelism movement in the US.
Living in New York at the height of the AIDS epidemic, watching friends and former partners die of the disease, Haring also began to include skulls and corpses in his later artwork, reflecting the morbidity of the time.
Viewing Haring's works from today's perspective also makes it clear that his thoughts toward progress were ahead of their time. He imagined heads exploding from an abundance of information. He drew a television atop a caterpillar (or is it a parasite?) that is larger in size than the crowds it marches over.
Considering the meaning behind these symbols — deciphering Haring's unique hieroglyphics within the context of the time — is the aim of the Albertina's exhibition, which is timed to coincide with what would have been the artist's 60th birthday. He died of complications from AIDS in 1990 at the age of 31.
