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The Keith Haring Foundation • ©1997–2022 • Terms of Use

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Photo: Jack Mitchell / Contributor / Getty Images

Quick Facts

"Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic."

Kutztown Area Senior High School, School of Visual Arts, Ivy School of Professional Art

American artist Keith Haring was best known for his graffiti-inspired drawings, which he first made in subway stations and later exhibited in museums.

Who Was Keith Haring?

Keith Haring moved to New York City in 1978 and began using the city as his canvas, making chalk drawings in subway stations. His art was eventually seen everywhere from public murals and nightclubs to galleries and museums around the world. He was also known for his activism in promoting AIDS awareness. He died of AIDS-related complications on February 16, 1990, at age 31.

Early Life

Haring was born on May 4, 1958, in Reading, Pennsylvania. His parents, Allen and Joan Haring, raised Haring and his three sisters in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. As a child, Haring was fascinated by the cartoon art of Walt Disney and Charles Schultz and the illustrations of Dr. Seuss. He spent many hours drawing with his father, an engineer whose hobby was cartooning. After graduating from high school in 1976, Haring briefly attended the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh, dropping out after two semesters. In 1978, he decided to return to school, moving to New York City to enroll at the School of Visual Arts.

Early Artwork

When Haring arrived in New York, it was home to a thriving underground art scene. Haring befriended fellow emerging artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf, who shared his interest in the colorful and transgressive graffiti art of the city's streets. Haring and these other artists organized exhibitions at downtown nightclubs and other alternative locations, where art, music and fashion all came together in a dynamic mix.

Beyond the clubs, Haring began using the city as his canvas. Riding the subway, he noticed the black paper rectangles of empty advertising panels on station walls; using white chalk, he began filling these black panels with simple, quickly drawn pictures. His signature images included dancing figures, a "radiant baby" (a crawling infant emitting rays of light), a barking dog, a flying saucer, large hearts, and figures with televisions for heads. These graffiti drawings attracted the attention of New York commuters, as well as the city authorities: Haring was arrested for vandalism on numerous occasions.

Success and Acclaim

Haring soon began to apply his universally recognizable imagery to freestanding drawings and paintings. The energy and optimism of his art, with its bold lines and bright colors, brought him popularity with a wide audience. He had his first solo exhibition in 1981, at the Westbeth Painters Space in Manhattan. In 1982 he began to show his art at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, which would represent him for the rest of his career. Throughout the 1980s, Haring's work was exhibited widely both within the United States and internationally. He also collaborated with other artists and performers, including Andy Warhol, Grace Jones and William S. Burroughs.

Always wanting to make his art more accessible, Haring opened a retail store called the Pop Shop in New York City's SoHo neighborhood in 1986; the shop sold posters, T-shirts and other affordable items featuring Haring's signature designs. Over the brief span of his career, the artist completed more than 50 public works, including the anti-drug mural Crack is Wack in a Harlem playground and an illuminated, animated billboard of his "radiant baby" image for New York's Times Square. He also hosted numerous art workshops for children.

In 1988, Haring was diagnosed with AIDS. The following year, he created the Keith Haring Foundation to support children's programs and organizations dedicated to raising AIDS awareness.

Death and Legacy

Haring died in New York on February 16, 1990, of AIDS-related complications. He was 31 years old. His art is still exhibited worldwide, and many of his works are owned by prestigious museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, France. Haring's art, with its deceptively simple style and its deeper themes of love, death, war and social harmony, continues to appeal strongly to viewers.

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"Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic."

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Coloured Part
diptych> religion
5 colours:
-yellow: hair
-pink: face
- white: teeth
-aqua: collar and eyelid
-orange: background
Black and white part
-silver, black and white: Marilyn's death, her fading, Holliwood screens

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Anatomy of an Artwork: Andy Warhol's Marilyn Diptych at Tate Modern

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Marilyn Monroe was and still remains one of the biggest sex-symbols of all the time. When she was alive, her personal life was more interesting than her professional one. Warhol had become fascinated by the idea of popular figures such as Monroe that lived unimaginably glamorous lifestyles and who had attained an almost mythical status as Hollywood ICONS.
The five rows of the diptych resemble the movie like strips that acknowledge her status as an icon. The repetition of her image symbolized mass production while the diptych style that was used in the portrait was inspired by the Byzantine icons of Christian saints. By placing Marilyn Monroe’s portraits in the diptych, Warhol was commenting on the saint-like nature that fans assign celebrities, which in turn causes the public to approach celebrities with some sense of holiness and immortality.
Warhol’s art was created to remind audiences and fans that there is actually a real person behind all the fame and glamour. Perhaps he wanted to depict to the world that these famous women were regular human beings that experienced pain and suffering, despite their celebrity.
This Diptych can also be said to have been a celebration as well as a satire of the world’s obsession with materiality and fame. It was both worship and analysis that criticized and encouraged a culture that had become obsessed with money and fame. At the same time, Warhol also used Marilyn to criticize himself, as he was also after the same fame and celebrity that his famous subjects enjoyed.
Although he was careful to conceal his faith throughout his career, it is believed that the Marilyn Monroe diptych, was also explicitly religious: Marilyn Monroe appears in the canvas as a superhuman and is almost saintly-like. Marylin was therefore used to represent a martyr that has to this day remained unchanged and immaculate even as the rest of contemporary society continues to rot and waste away.

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An iconic artist of the American Pop Art movement, Andy Warhol (Pittsburg, 1928 – New York, 1987) was one of the most influential artists on an international level in the period after World War II. Warhol not only changed the rules of the visual arts, but also, more generally, of communication, multimedia and publishing, as well as the notion of the artist as a public figure, and of the artwork as a consumer good and simulacrum of the collective imagination. Born to Slovak parents, from 1945 he studied design and the visual arts, and this union of information, art and commerce quickly became the fundamental core of his aesthetics. During his years working as an illustrator, Warhol took an interest in printing techniques such as the silkscreen (serigrafia) process. This technique then became the principal means by which the artist revolutionized pictorial language, introducing the mechanical, impersonal and serial nature of the work’s creation into the grammar of contemporary art. Moving to New York, and having also worked as a window-dresser, in the early 1960s Warhol devoted himself exclusively to the visual arts, holding his first one-man exhibitions where he showed works that radically broke away from the period’s pictorial language linked to Abstract Expressionism.

Through works such as 100 Soup Cans, 100 Coke Bottles and 100 Dollar Bills, Warhol conceived a visual universe dominated by symbols of mass consumption (canned soup, Coca-Cola, the dollar), replacing the idea of art as an individual and interior form of expression with the concept that art is a kind of record of reality and the present. During those years, Warhol developed a technique that began with silkscreen printing (a process for printing and duplicating photographic images) and continued with the application of acrylic colors which were spread in rough patches to distinguish different versions of the same image. In this way, the artist generated friction between the uniqueness traditionally associated with artworks and the unlimited reproducibility of the photographic image.