Keith Haring at the Brant Foundation: 8 Key Works

Buchhart: This ink drawing was done on a huge piece of paper, and Haring mapped it all out in his mind. We know from videos of him making this work that he had the image he wanted to create in his mind. In the center is a very important figure, one we see in some of the tarp works as well: one person holding another up. Is it a corpse, or someone cheering?

Hofbauer: Often when he drew these figures, it was about honoring and elevating. And the figures on the bottom, are they tying to escape the scene?

Buchhart: There is always both sides. They could be fleeing, or cheering. There’s often an ambiguity in Haring’s work, which is a really important point.

Buchhart: We’re really proud to be able to show some of Haring’s most important subway drawings. Many of them—like Robot and Airplane—include the fiberglass frame. The subway was the laboratory where Haring developed his artistic language, his ideas, many of which he later transferred into large-scale drawings in his studio.

When he was making these drawings, it was a bad time in New York. Instead of advertisements on the subway, there were just blank black papers, and Haring would draw on them. He’d use what was provided to him by the subway.

Hofbauer: The “X” was a way for Haring to mark something that was important to him. Similar to how the rays highlighted something important.

Buchhart: Haring probably did 12,000 subway drawings. The reason we have a sense of this is because his friend, the photographer Tseng Kwong Chi, following Haring through the subway system many times and took more than 22,000 images, so from this you can estimate.

Haring, by the way, was very irritated that people ripped the subway drawings out because he made them for New Yorkers on the subway, not collectors. But, we are happy and lucky that people did it.

Buchhart: We are really proud of the fantastic selection of nine tarps in the show. All of them were of special importance to Haring.

Hofbauer: It’s going to be a very powerful moment, bringing them all together on one wall in the right constellation.

Haring more or less randomly discovered that the tarpaulin—otherwise used on trucks and so forth—was a great art material for him. He was looking for a material that he could max out. Where do you find this kind of size and proportion? He saw them on trucks and realized he could use tarps to make something really, really huge.

Buchhart: They’re very rare, very hard to track down.

Hofbauer: There is a really meaningful quote from Haring about the one with a figure with a hole in his stomach. When he made it, he was reacting to the death of John Lennon on Dec. 8, 1980.

Hofbauer: This is a wonderful, huge work. We must remember that Haring went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and studied the Egyptian art there. These dogs have a close relationship to the Anubis creature, which he would have seen at the Met. They’re also about breakdancing, performance, and being in a public space.

Buchhart: This is a great example of one of Haring’s fluorescent paint on metal works. We do have a black light room in the show, but this work will be shown outside of it. We’re only showing true masterpieces in the show, and some of them will be on their own.

Buchhart: Haring made quite a few vases. This is one of the larger ones, and the only one in the show. He hand-drew all the scenes, and there are so many of them.

Hofbauer: His line is impeccable. He didn’t do any sketches or tryouts or anything. He just drew. And he had a perfect line.

Buchhart: When Haring was at the Met, he also looked at Greek and Roman vases. The upper part of the vase is more complex, but the lower part has strips with a crawling baby, one after another, and other figures. It’s a little more like the borders of a Greek vase.

Buchhart: Haring made these storyboards on long rolls of paper he had in his studio. They’re fantastic, and nearly human-size in height. He first showed them at P.S. 122 [now Performance Space New York] in 1980, which is just a few blocks from where the Brant Foundation now is.

Hofbauer: In one of the middle panels, there’s a flying saucer and a copulating couple. What I find particularly humorous is the lines radiating off the couple, which he used to give objects or figures glowing power.

Buchhart: The flying saucer is also very important. It’s a reference to him being different in his sexuality. It’s a way to mark otherness and power.

Buchhart: This is the one work in the show that is from his show at Fun Gallery in 1983. It’s large, nearly 9 feet in length. It looks like a map of the U.S. He initially showed this on colorful spray-painted walls, which we did when we included it in a show at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne [in 2019-20]. He, we wanted viewers to be able to focus on every single work, so we are presenting it differently.