Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring by Brad Gooch review – from the subway to the gift shop

This new biography describes Haring as a nimble, spontaneous performer and an artist of endearing naivety who was nevertheless corrupted by his popularity

Keith Haring’s career began underground, but soon zoomed to stratospheric altitudes. His cartoons of irradiated babies, attributed to an anonymous scribbler known as Chalkman, began to crawl along the walls of New York subway stations in 1978. A few years later, now a household name, Haring was shuttling across the Atlantic by Concorde, commissioned to daub liberating slogans on the Berlin Wall, to paint gymnasts cavorting on a tower at a children’s hospital in Paris, and to decorate a Tuscan monastery with a crucified Christ who supports a lolloping dolphin on his bowed shoulders. A typical side trip took him to Monaco to receive an award from Princess Caroline. In his spare time he lucratively sketched a label for Absolut vodka, painted a BMW, and opened the Pop Shop to sell branded T-shirts in New York and Tokyo.

In 1990 Haring died, struck down by Aids at the age of 31. Among his regrets was his exclusion from the Museum of Modern Art’s galleries, where he thought he belonged with Klee and Léger. Classed as a scrawler of graffiti, he was confined to the gift store in the museum’s lobby, which did a brisk trade in the toddler-themed souvenirs he trademarked. Another unfulfilled ambition rankled: nearing death, he confided that he “really wanted to design a pair of sneakers”. And why not? As Brad Gooch points out, he often painted on the downtrodden Manhattan pavements that he shared with “the usual traffic of pimps, prostitutes, winos and junkies”; his art was street-smart, as twinkle-toed as his dancing marathons at gay discos on Saturday nights, when his sneakers sometimes made music because he accessorised them with ankle bells.

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