Keith Haring
This could only be the work of one man, Keith Haring (1958-1990). His style, featuring cartoon-like images of men, dogs, and other figures, all drawn as bold outlines, is instantly recognizable.
Haring, above, starting drawing as a child. He went to art school in Pennsylvania, but dropped out and moved to New York.
There he found inspiration in public art like subway graffiti. He began drawing with chalk in the New York subways on black paper that covered unused ad spaces (photo by Chantal Regnault, 1983). Although this led to him being arrested more than once, his subway drawings, in his unique style, started becoming so famous that people would take them and sell them. In effect, he had transformed graffiti into art, which eventually led to international recognition.
Another favorite medium was body painting, still with his unique style of bold lines and patterns. Here Haring is painting Bill T. Jones in 1983.
Look carefully, and you'll see Haring, naked, who has painted his body and posed against a background against which he is perfectly camouflaged. It reminds me of the "dazzle camouflage" used on ships in World War I and II to fool the eye by breaking up the outline, so an enemy wouldn't see it as a ship. Photo by Annie Leibovitz, 1986.
Haring was gay and did not shy away from sexual images, though they have the same cartoonish quality as the rest of his work. This self-mocking piece is called Self-Portrait with Juan, 1988.
When the LGBT Community Center in New York invited Haring to create a work in May, 1989, he chose to paint a mural in their men's room. Perhaps he was harkening back to his days of creating graffiti in the subway as public art. And, being a men's room, what was more natural than to cover the walls with sexual graffiti (but in his unique style, of course).
Haring called it Once Upon a Time. This was at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and these images looked back to a previous carefree time of free love.
Another wall of the men's room.
And yet another view. Is it obscene? Yes. Is it graffiti? Yes. Is it art? Yes.
Even as he painted the mural, Haring was fighting his own battle with AIDS. Nine months later, he was dead at age 31. "I'm not having trouble facing the reality of death," he said. "It is going to happen sometime. If you live your life according to that, death is irrelevant. Everything I’m doing right now is exactly what I want to do."
