Read Keith Haring Journals Online

Authors: Keith Haring

Keith Haring Journals (4 page)

BOOK: Keith Haring Journals
7.26Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
2. Haring and Léger’s style of 1942-55. In his diaries, Haring summarizes Léger’s last style as “color blocks with black lines on top.” He sometimes painted in his own reworking of this mode, in quest of variety, or muralizing reach, and perhaps also, when in Europe, as a salute to continental vision.
In Brussels, at a school for graphic design run by Haring’s friend Pierre Staeck, a teacher suddenly asked Haring if “it bothered him” that compositions where he used “color blocks with black lines on top” seemed heavily in debt to Léger. And Haring answered that no, it didn’t, and that he was flattered by the comparison.
But later, in the privacy of his diary, he commented much more extensively on the point. That very style, late Léger—black figurations over color blocks, dating from 1942 to the death of the artist in 1955—reflects, the story goes, the French artist’s fascination with the creation of “free color” in the flashing lights of Broadway:
When I was in New York in 1942 [Léger states] I was struck by the advertising spotlights that sweep the streets around Broadway. You are there talking to someone and all at once he turns blue. Then the color changes and he turns red or yellow . . . the color of the spotlights is free.
18
Black-lined figurations over “free” segments of blue, gold, green, and red appear almost immediately thereafter in Léger:
La Danse
of 1942,
Still Life with Two Fish
of 1948,
Polychrome Acrobats
of 1951.
19
In separating color from design, Léger gave Haring an instrument. Haring re-Americanized it and brought it on back home, in a sense, to the commodity crucible colors of the streets of New York.
But, as the diaries remind us, Haring “Légerizes” lightly, essentially to cover large areas, “usually on murals,” and only in terms of his own strong voice. Two fine examples: a painted surfboard for Xavier Nellens in the Dragon in Knokke and a mural on the exterior stairwell at the Necker Children’s Hospital in Paris in 1987.
In the process of completing the latter work, the American makes the Broadway-inspired French technique his own. Léger’s statuesque faces and heavy acrobatic gestures vanish. Haring replaces them with his own genericized children, reaching and gesturing through gold, red, blue, and green segments of color. The children touch, kick, and traverse these shapes, as if they were balls or other instruments of play. This breaks the seal of Léger’s abstraction in favor of something closer to the vision of a child. The color blocks themselves strongly recall Miró. But, as in the mobiles of his fellow American, Alexander Calder, Haring sets Miró’s shapes in motion. Finally, in his journal, Haring cannot resist adding that Léger “was quite disappointed when the ‘workers’ in the factory rejected his offer. This is not the case with me.”
3. Haring and Stella. On January 3, 1988, Haring visited Frank Stella’s second retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This stimulates a long and thoughtful passage. There is an edge to the writing. Haring is jealous. And so what he has to say does not exactly match William Rubin’s eulogizing catalogue. From Haring:
The viewer is overwhelmed and consumed by the scale alone.
Colors geometrically, mathematically chosen. A kind of “making fun” of the painting process. . . .
He knows there is no more “risk” for him, so he tries to create “risk.” . . . A well-planned practical joke? Actually “practical” joke is perfect.
It is “practical” in that it follows all the right rules and breaks all the right rules. . . . But it is infuriating for [certain critics] to say how Stella was the only artist capable of translating the “graffiti-like” use of garish colors and gestures into a successful art work. . . . I refuse to be forced to believe that this is “quality” and I am not. . . . I’ll grant [Stella] that he knows about constructions and shapes and space and the surface. . . . There are several pieces that seem to “make fun” of my patterned surface. . . . Yes, this is Frank Stella’s second retrospective at MoMA. They have not even shown one of my pieces yet. In their eyes I don’t exist.
The Stella show was a slap in the face. But it made him work harder. He told John Gruen that with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol gone, it was time for him to prove something. But this partial truth concealed a spirit of rivalry and competitiveness unleashed by the Stella retrospective.
The man who could face rejection with a humorous command to himself to “read Nietzsche,” who never gave up in spite of what the mirror told him every morning about his health, targeted the weaponry of Stella and other modernists, seized them, made them his own, transforming 1988-89 into his finest hour. In short, he won. Recently the Museum of Modern Art acquired one of his works, thus ending what Haring considered a long siege against his reputation.
Still and all, the cause of Haring has not been furthered by publications which uncritically crowd his works together, the good and the bad. This is not what Haring himself would want. Explicitly criticizing such procedures, he once wrote that “the idea of the show is great, but the choice of works starts to be muddled by too many inferior pieces.”
The ideal Haring retrospective will edit out second-level works, warm-up exercises, and off-moments, and concentrate on where he was
engagé
and brilliant, such as certain drawings and paintings about AIDS, fluent work done in Knokke, Belgium, and where he was exalted, bending modernism into new shapes by fusion with the steps and silhouettes of black and Latino dancing of the early eighties at the Roxy and, even more so, the Paradise Garage.
HARING AND AIDS
Never knowing, after 1988, when AIDS might take him, Haring painted in the late eighties to save others and keep himself alive. Characteristically, he enriched the documents of alarm with variations of astonishing strength.
First, there are paintings and posters which are straightforwardly activist, like his famous
Silence=Death
composition, dated May 7, 1989. Haring fills a pink triangle with ghostly silver figures, covering their eyes or closing their ears.
20
Haring states in his diary that he wants danger declared: “There really can’t be any more anonymous sex.” And so, in a memorable composition, he probes the terror in extreme promiscuity: a machine of desire that gives itself to death, achieving completion by means of grasping, coiling, licking, and opening. And from this carnal culmination hang victims from their penises. Their heads topple earthward, their eyes are crossed out, and one of their tongues lolls lifeless on the ground. These are beings who have fucked themselves to death.
Haring dared to personify the virus—as demonic sperm—in a series executed in red and black sumi ink on blocks of paper, on April 24, 1988.
21
There are many ways of confronting the crisis. Luis Cruz Azaceta, in a powerful series illustrating ravaged bodies marked with KS, shows effect. Haring shows cause, the virus itself.
“Demon sperm” (the phrase is Haring’s) bursts from an egg, like a giant horned insect. Its horns break the frame of crimson, as if escaping from the paper. Haring locates the lairs of the virus: drug addicts’ needles, uncovered penises and vaginas. In the best of these compositions, Haring stops his incessant “drawing,” achieving a Zen-like emptiness of space crossed by a calligraphic line.
If this series is important, it is because the artist expressed the presence of a killer by a radical combination of elegance and shock.
And having shocked us to save us, Haring breaks depression with a strong and moving work. Clearly aware here of the Mexican folk-handling of the theme of death, Haring defies the terror. He shows that in the spirit of his art, not his doomed body, his durability must be sought.
And so we have Haring’s untitled “diptych” (for James Ensor), acrylic on canvas on two panels, completed May 5, 1989.
22
Ensor, of course, himself painted skeletons, deepening the allusion.
Haring numbers the panels, to indicate sequence. In the first, a skeleton with closed jaws and constricted rib cage touches a key, strangely luminous, while ejaculating over a bed of flowers. This could be the key that locks us to our doom, but it disappears. In the second panel, the sperm of the dead man has caused the flowers to flourish. They reach for the sun, higher than his head. This is “pushing up daisies” in an elegaic sense. The skull is smiling. His ribs relax and open. Haring accepts his death. For in his art he found the key to transform desire, the force that killed him, into a flowering elegance that will live beyond his time.
KNOKKE: LIFE IN THE DRAGON
Haring certainly lives on in Knokke, on the coast of Belgium, where one of his best murals graces the Casino near the center of the town. Palm Beach with a Flemish accent, Knokke-le-Zoute is a treasure of the European summer, sited between Amsterdam and Dunkirk, in Belgium, very near the Holland border.
Of all the places where Haring worked, Knokke was his favorite, with the sole exception of New York. In the whole of his recorded voyaging, Knokke is the only place where, upon return, he jots down “home again.” His Knokke journals show how richly he lived in Europe, in terms of giving and receiving affection, where artists like Tinguely, museums like the Stedelijk, and aristocratic patrons like Princess Caroline of Monaco, recognized and accepted his genius years before major New York museums finally got around to purchasing his works.
Haring loved Knokke. His hosts, Roger and Monique Nellens, gave him moral support and privacy at a critical point in his life.
On June 6, 1987, Monique Nellens, whose husband organizes the summer exhibitions of the Casino, came to Antwerp, picked up Haring and Juan Rivera, and drove them to Knokke, to an incredible structure built in the east corner of their garden: “We put our things in ‘the Dragon’ (the Niki de St. Phalle/Tinguely sculpture we are living in).”
Niki de St. Phalle designed the Dragon in 1971. Tinguely, her former husband, added sculpture. It is a wild, out-of-control sculpture habitat with offbeat eyes, a heavy claw that anchors the leviathan to the earth, and a marvelous red mouth with tongue as never-never fire escape. St. Phalle, in a sense, took Gaudí one step further with her characteristic mixture of architectural space and humorous eroticism: The scale is right, the tempo is right, and the flowing white skin, embellished with painted figures and painted stars, superb.
Inside, a crocodile skull wired by Tinguely snaps at all visitors with electrified jaws, and a free-form staircase, leading to the bedroom, bears a Haring mural that starts with a sign of love, carries through male bodies, including one on a dolphin, and ends with an acrobatic
mise-en-scène
honoring the swimmers and surfers of Knokke. On the wall, in fact, is a surfboard Haring painted for the Nellens’ son, Xavier, in the Légerizing substyle, on June 22, 1987.
The bedroom in the Dragon is like living in a body underwater, punctuated with various organic openings in unexpected places.
Haring loved it. It was an enormously stimulating place in which to live and work—he completed, in addition to the staircase mural, scores of drawings within the Dragon.
Apparently, among all the Nellenses’ guests, no one except Haring loved living in the belly of this monster: Niki de St. Phalle actually came to Knokke to see her genial sculpture-building at last inhabited and accepted. Meanwhile, Roger Nellens (“the best chef in Europe”) cooked Haring inventive gourmet meals and Tinguely called him and “told me he talks of me almost every day. This makes me feel quite proud.”
Haring, after a trip to Düsseldorf—where he saw a duck cross the street—returns to Knokke on June 18 and admires the wild boar that Roger shot the night before. “It is really like a country house here and kind of timeless in a way.” On to the major purpose of his visit:
Saturday, June 20: 12:00 NOON. To Casino to begin big mural. Wall is about 14ʹ × 50ʹ. I do drawing with black acrylic of detailed “gambling scene.” Big brush and pretty quickly. Very Dubuffet, or something, with a little hint of Stuart Davis. I finish at 3:30 PM to applause.
Haring is being humorous when he compares his line with Dubuffet and Stuart Davis. The convergence with the intensity of Dubuffet’s line in, say, the latter’s “hourloupe” drawings and constructions of the late seventies presents an intriguing coincidence.
23
The same point applies to Stuart Davis’s broad planar cubist style. Davis’s
Anyside
of 1961 boldly outlines shapes and patterns with a strong black line not unlike the armature of the Knokke mural.
24
Nevertheless, Haring was, in the Knokke mural, operating completely in terms of his own self-minted alternative style, differing from the dolphins, dogs, and radiant children in the return to facial and anatomic detail, and in the handling of that in terms of rhythmized parallel lines and “dangerous” eyes made of tubes. The latter evoke one kind of Dan and Grebo mask in West African sculpture, which he knew both from the handbooks and from Picasso’s versioning of this trait in his
Guitar
of early 1912
.
25
Three of the gamblers are dragons, likely reflecting the impact of his lodgings. They and the other fantastic personae read like fugitives from the famous “cantina scene” on the planet Tatooine in
Star Wars.
They are busy smoking, laying down cash, and playing cards while Death rolls dice and another figure indicates a wheel of fortune. This musing on art and gambling is climaxed by an homage to René Magritte in the upper left-hand corner. There Haring restates and frames Magritte’s “masked apples,” a mural which adorns a room next to that which shelters the Haring mural.
 
On the following day, Haring goes “to Casino to finish mural with everyone from lunch. Fill in color inside all the black shapes—one color at a time. Very ‘Cobra’ brushwork and very drippy. Finish around 9:30. . . .” He evokes complicating comparisons to Alechinsky, and the Cobra school, as he did to Dubuffet and Stuart Davis. However, as Haring himself later points out in his journals, “this is because of the quality of drawing, not imitation.” The linear elements recall, if anyone, Picasso. But the information being conveyed, and the way he mixes it with fear of his own death plus respect for his colleague, Magritte, is pure Haring.
BOOK: Keith Haring Journals
7.26Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Kellion by Marian Tee
Minstrel's Serenade by Aubrie Dionne
The Truth-Teller's Tale by Sharon Shinn
Easy Pickings by Ce Murphy, Faith Hunter
Root of Unity by SL Huang
Smoke and Mirrors by Margaret McHeyzer
The Engagement Deal by Kim Lawrence
Silent Whisper by Andrea Smith
Anything but Vanilla by Madelynne Ellis