Has pop art icon Keith Haring been ‘sanitised’?

The layers of his work

Despite some critiques of the way his work is licensed, Haring’s stock as a serious artist has arguably never been higher. Last week, an exhibition dedicated to his formative years in early 1980s New York opened at The Brant Foundation in Manhattan. Now this week, an entirely separate exhibition featuring Haring’s highly influential subway drawings is opening at the Moco Museum in London. Titled Voice of the Street, it features some of the thousands of graffiti illustrations that Haring drew with chalk on blacked-out advertising panels in New York subway stations between 1980 and 1985.

“Where other people saw the emptiness of a blacked-out space, he saw a real opportunity,” Kim Logchies Prins, the founder and curator of Moco Museum, tells the BBC. “His mission was to break down barriers so that art wasn’t only available in high-end galleries; he was literally giving it to people on their way to work.” Indeed, Haring only stopped making his subway drawings when people began stealing them to sell to collectors.

Haring’s subway drawings were supposed to be spontaneous and ephemeral – he started sketching them while bored waiting for trains – but they helped him to hone an instantly recognisable aesthetic that has proved enduring. His work’s continued appeal is predicated on the accessibility that Haring, who grew up in small-town Pennsylvania before moving to New York in 1978, baked into the way he made and disseminated his art.

Dr Fiona Anderson, a senior lecturer in art history at Newcastle University in the UK, tells the BBC that “anybody looking at a Haring [piece] can get something out of it”. However, she also believes that his pieces operate on multiple levels. “You can analyse his work in relation to semiotics, the study of signs and symbols,” Anderson says, “but you can also look at a staple Haring image like a barking dog or the ‘radiant baby’ and enjoy it [more simply] as a joyful, playful icon”. 

Laura Levine/ Corbis via Getty Images/ Moco