Exhibit of the week: Keith Haring: 1978–1982

Brooklyn Museum

Through July 8

For Keith Haring, New York City in the late 1970s “must have seemed like heaven,” said Barbara Hoffman in the New York Post. An “arty gay kid from Kutztown, Pa.,” Haring fed off the energies of graffiti artists and the downtown club scene to transform himself, by age 22, into a street-art Boy Warhol. Borrowing visual tropes from Pablo Picasso, Jean Dubuffet, and Egyptian hieroglyphs, Haring developed a distinctive aesthetic vocabulary—bold-line renderings of babies, UFOs, dolphins, three-eyed smiley faces—then spread it across the city by chalking or painting jigsaw-like images on sidewalks, on building walls, and in subway stations. The Brooklyn Museum’s new show offers an energizing “crash course” on Haring’s early work, retracing the rise of a short-lived artist who “blurred the lines between high art and low” and helped push street art into America’s museums.

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That transition does his work no favors, said R.C. Baker in The Village Voice. Haring died of complications from AIDS in 1990, at age 31, so we’ll never know if his output would have grown richer if he’d had more time. Sure, “his heart was always in the right place”: His dedication to making art for the broad public shines through in the bold white-on-black drawings he dashed off in the subway while dodging transit cops. The purpose of these cartoonish images was “to snag and briefly entrance scurrying eyeballs,” and in the hurly-burly of the underground, they “make perfect sense.” But Haring’s initial graphic inventiveness “too often slid into one-note turgidity,” and in a museum this erstwhile wunderkind merely looks “out of his depth.”

Or maybe possessed of new depths, said Karen Rosenberg in The New York Times. There’s much here besides dog-headed men and Haring’s other highly marketable comics-page cribs. Videos like 1979’s Painting Myself Into a Corner, in which the artist does just that while bopping to a Devo song, show that the young man had a real knack for the medium. The manufactured newspaper headlines that he photocopied and pasted on street posts and walls—such as “Reagan Slain by Hero Cop”—reveal him to have been “a social-media savant in a Xerox and Polaroid age.” Each of these “other Harings” should prove “just as relevant” to young artists as the one they’re likely to come seeking—the club kid who hit art’s big time. “Go, and enjoy the party,” but “keep an eye out” for Keith Haring’s quieter dimensions.