Radiant (2024)

Radiant

Keith Haring’s career started in the underground but quickly soared to unimaginable heights. In 1978, his drawings of radioactive babies, credited to an anonymous artist known as Chalkman, began crawling across New York subway walls. A few years later he was a household name, flying by Concorde to daub liberating slogans on the Berlin Wall, paint gymnasts pirouetting on a tower at a children’s hospital in Paris and bedeck a Tuscan monastery with a crucified Christ who bears on his bowed shoulders a lolling dolphin. On one typical detour he went to Monaco to collect an award from Princess Caroline; meanwhile he lucratively sketched an Absolut vodka label in his spare time, painted a BMW and opened the Pop Shop to sell branded T-shirts in New York and Tokyo.

Haring died of Aids in 1990 aged 31. One of his regrets was that he never made it inside the Museum of Modern Art’s galleries: classified as a graffitist, he was consigned to the gift shop in its lobby, which did good business in baby themed souvenirs that he had trademarked. Another unfulfilled ambition rankled: near death he said wistfully that what he “really wanted to do was design a pair of sneakers”.

Well why not? As Brad Gooch points out, many of Haring’s paintings were done on the downtrodden Manhattan pavements where “the usual traffic of pimps, prostitutes, winos and junkies” kept him company; street-smart is as good an adjective for his art as twinkle-toed is for the dancing marathons he performed at gay discos every Saturday night sometimes his sneakers jingled because they were adorned with ankle bells.

Gooch treats Haring as a balding bespectacled Peter Pan figure who played godfather to all his friends’ children. Babies are everywhere in Haring’s iconography, but so are erect penises though he always kept the two types of drawing separate. Straining a bit, he thought of sexual exploration as childish play: when he arrived in New York from the grimly named Pennsylvania suburb of Kutztown, he celebrated Christopher Street’s cruising ground in Greenwich Village as “a gay Disneyland” and painted a priapic Mickey Mouse among its habitués.

But popularity spoiled Haring. Gooch is careful not to pass judgment, but his language gives away some nastier truths. At his best Haring was an agile improviser, dashing off works on paper while spectators marvelled at his fluency. When galleries began to represent him he had to start producing what Gooch calls “content” for those white cubes; planning exhibitions he worried about their “entertainment value”, measured success by the number of celebrities who limoed downtown for the opening night. Haring’s ubiquity and sudden wealth made even the ungregarious Andy Warhol wince: according to Warhol, in his sly estimation, Haring was “an advertising agency unto himself”.

Gooch saw Haring becoming increasingly isolated, fighting against Ronald Reagan’s nuclear posturing and his dismissal of Aids as a threat. His imagery turned apocalyptic. “Red spray-paint bursts of energy” now exploded across his design. His cute monsters underwent sick mutations, with “a six-breasted computer-headed beast straddling the fuselage of a downed jet plane”. Frisky penises gave way to depictions of what Gooch calls “the demon sperm”, a black-horned insect hatched in the syringes of addicts or nesting in unprotected bodily cavities.

But was this grotesquerie tragic or merely spooky? Gooch sabotages his own claims about Haring’s new seriousness by remarking that his last works look “as if Walt Disney were illustrating the Book of Revelation”. Banksy’s writing on walls can spell out maledictions; even in his panoramas of disaster, Haring was irrepressibly upbeat.

Gooch treats Haring as an alter ego: he knew him slightly; starting as a fashion model, the young Gooch took part in the same nocturnal revels as Haring, and in 1996 he commemorated that era of unsafe sex in a novel cheekily entitled The Golden Age of Promiscuity. With sobriety came self-help, and Dating the Greek Gods (2003) saw Gooch offering gay men “empowering spiritual messages on sex and love, creativity and wisdom”; the biography wishes the same aspirations on Haring, who was perhaps less high-minded than Gooch fancies. An evangelising “Jesus freak” in his adolescence, Haring later decided that acid trips were a more reliable way of seeing God and burbled that he opened his Pop Shop not to make money but as “a spirit thing really”.

Haring gave haloes to the babies he painted, making them the “purest and most positive” symbols of existence, and often lamented that he would never be a father. Gooch lives in a happier world. His book therefore concludes with a scene of domestic beatitude that Haring could hardly have imagined: Gooch and his husband introduce their young sons to Haring’s work, after which they retire to the connubial bed, where Gooch reads aloud from his manuscript.

But the vignette is cosy rather than radiant, lacking the electric vitality of those jiving babies. Haring thought art was a form of magic; after his Aids diagnosis he said he hoped “to heal myself by painting”. He didn’t and Gooch fuzzily softens that sad outcome: nominating Haring as “forever a member of our family”, he chooses to stress his own happier ending.

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