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Keith Haring was born on May 4, 1958 in Reading, Pennsylvania, and was raised in nearby Kutztown, Pennsylvania. He developed a love for drawing at a very early age, learning basic cartooning skills from his father and from the popular culture around him, such as Dr. Seuss and Walt Disney.
Upon graduation from high school in 1976, Haring enrolled in the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh, a commercial arts school. He soon realized that he had little interest in becoming a commercial graphic artist and, after two semesters, dropped out. While in Pittsburgh, Haring continued to study and work on his own and in 1978 had a solo exhibition of his work at the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center.
This was the schizophrenic character of the New York art world, too: on the one hand, there were the stars of the 57th Street establishment (principally the luminaries of pop art) and on the other, a band of creative people who marked out their territory around SoHo and the East Village, inspired by the counter-cultural ideals and lifestyles of the Beat Generation. Among these were the graffiti artists.
The graffiti artists, who arrived on the New York scene at the beginning of the seventies, experienced an “aggressive” period that lasted right through that decade. Emerging out of Harlem, the South Bronx, and the Lower East Side, they identified themselves through various “schools”, an artistic offshoot of fifties street “gangs”. Therefore, their art was historically confrontational, provocative, and illegal by vocation, tending to a uniformity of style as a mark of a particular identity. Keith Haring is very often associated with graffiti or spray art, but his relationship with those schools is minimal, although there are several points of intersection and they shared the same urban cultural milieu.
Keith Haring is always identified first and foremost with the early icons with which he made his public debut: the radiant baby, the barking dog and his unmistakable outline men tangled up in various, partly “comic” or abstruse actions. Moreover, his icons and symbol-like figures are so easily remembered for their similarity to a signature that they automatically became symbols characterizing his drawing, thus making them an ideal link with the commercialization of Haring’s pictures and the world of painting beyond the classical art market. From this they inevitably received positive energy which is inscribed like a quasi definition, even fatefully, on the commercial product. This fatefulness, however, also possesses in this connection a tragic component which had to be endured both in Haring’s art and in his life. Whilst the tragedy of the early end of Haring’s life, which up to this point had been driven by martyr-like stylization, had been capable of being perfectly integrated both in idealization and popularization for the art (market) elite. This did not correspond at all to the peculiarity of his personal fate, nor to the actual character of Haring’s world of pictures which on closer inspection has nothing in common with the generally accepted image of an American artist.
Upon graduation from high school in 1976, Haring enrolled in the Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh, a commercial arts school. He soon realized that he had little interest in becoming a commercial graphic artist and, after two semesters, dropped out. While in Pittsburgh, Haring continued to study and work on his own and in 1978 had a solo exhibition of his work at the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center.
This was the schizophrenic character of the New York art world, too: on the one hand, there were the stars of the 57th Street establishment (principally the luminaries of pop art) and on the other, a band of creative people who marked out their territory around SoHo and the East Village, inspired by the counter-cultural ideals and lifestyles of the Beat Generation. Among these were the graffiti artists.
The graffiti artists, who arrived on the New York scene at the beginning of the seventies, experienced an “aggressive” period that lasted right through that decade. Emerging out of Harlem, the South Bronx, and the Lower East Side, they identified themselves through various “schools”, an artistic offshoot of fifties street “gangs”. Therefore, their art was historically confrontational, provocative, and illegal by vocation, tending to a uniformity of style as a mark of a particular identity. Keith Haring is very often associated with graffiti or spray art, but his relationship with those schools is minimal, although there are several points of intersection and they shared the same urban cultural milieu.
Keith Haring is always identified first and foremost with the early icons with which he made his public debut: the radiant baby, the barking dog and his unmistakable outline men tangled up in various, partly “comic” or abstruse actions. Moreover, his icons and symbol-like figures are so easily remembered for their similarity to a signature that they automatically became symbols characterizing his drawing, thus making them an ideal link with the commercialization of Haring’s pictures and the world of painting beyond the classical art market. From this they inevitably received positive energy which is inscribed like a quasi definition, even fatefully, on the commercial product. This fatefulness, however, also possesses in this connection a tragic component which had to be endured both in Haring’s art and in his life. Whilst the tragedy of the early end of Haring’s life, which up to this point had been driven by martyr-like stylization, had been capable of being perfectly integrated both in idealization and popularization for the art (market) elite. This did not correspond at all to the peculiarity of his personal fate, nor to the actual character of Haring’s world of pictures which on closer inspection has nothing in common with the generally accepted image of an American artist.