Keith Haring hit it big in the early 1980s. By the time of his death at 31, in 1990, his name had become a byword around the world for creative flow. Also, for joy.
I love Haring’s work, which has clear affinities with the art of A.R. Penck, Jean Dubuffet, Fernand Léger and Pierre Alechinsky, among others. When he danced, according to a friend from his student days in Pittsburgh, he “had a bottom beat,” or natural rhythm, and that sense of rhythm is palpable in his drawing. The explosion of graffiti on New York’s subway, in which he participated from 1980 on, contributed to his vision of a more public-facing art.
“Innocence,” Gooch writes, “was the west wind that blew through much of Haring’s work.” One of his early nicknames was “Swee’Pea,” borrowed from the baby character in Popeye. The name, Gooch writes, “fit the boyish, sweet, innocent, immature qualities Keith projected.” Haring came out early in 1978 and moved to New York later that year. He likened arriving in the West Village to “landing in a candy store or, better, a gay Disneyland.” “It was almost too much,” Haring later remembered of the Village. “You couldn’t go to the post office without cruising or being cruised — without being totally aware of sex.”Haring thought sex was probably the single strongest impulse he felt, and there’s no question that it fed into his art-making.
Warhol, who coined the term “Business Art,” is of course the key figure. Theorists of contemporary art presented Business Art as a cunning new move in the enervated endgame that was postwar avant-gardism — a new way to lay bare the relationship between art and society.
Entertainment Entertainment Latest News, Entertainment Entertainment Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: NewYorker - 🏆 90. / 67 Read more »