Body Language: Keith Haring and the Renaissance of Figurative Painting in the Eighties

“One is not born a painter as one is born a ventriloquist. The desire can develop in anyone; talent and vocation are just hot air, tinged with cant. Everyone is able to paint, just as everyone is able to speak.”
— Jean Dubuffett¹

The aim of the following essay is to place Keith Haring’s work, the content and form of which are examined in detail in the other essays in the catalogue, in the context of the painting of his time. A general stylistic classification of his work within the art of the Eighties should thus indirectly follow from the presentation of examples of different, but nevertheless related stances on figurative painting.

In 1982 Keith Haring expressed his enthusiasm for painting at the documenta 7 exhibition in Kassel, where he prefaced his own comments in the exhibition catalogue with a quotation from Jean Dubuffet: “Painting has a two-fold advantage over the language of words. First of all, painting conjures up objects with greater strength and gets much closer to them. Secondly, painting opens up a bigger door outside to the inner dance of the painter’s world of ideas.”² The choice of quotation indicated not just Haring’s interest in the art and the theory of art of the protagonists of Art Brut³ which flourished in the Fifties, but also the special role which he assigned to painting as opposed to language as a means of artistic expression. This is informative, since Haring had experimented with texts and fragments of sentences some years before as an art student influenced by the conceptual art of his teacher Keith Sonnier.⁴

At about the same time that Haring completed his studies in Pittsburgh and New York (1976-1980), painting was experiencing a new revival in Western Europe and the USA. The exhibition organizer, Christos M. Joachimides, described this vividly and euphorically in 1981: “The artist’s studios are full of paint pots again and an abandoned easel in an art school has become a rare sight. Wherever you look in Europe or America you find artists who have rediscovered the sheer joy of painting. In the studios, in the cafes and bars, wherever artists or students gather, you hear passionate debates and arguments about painting. In short, artists are involved in painting again, it has become current to them, and this new consciousness of the contemporary significance of the oldest form of their art is in the air, tangibly, wherever art is being made.”⁵ In a painting from 1980/1981, Anselm Kiefer clarified this almost existential meaning (and, up till the present time, danger) of painting, metaphorically, as a “tightrope act” of the palette as classical attribute of the painter’s art. Painting as such was no longer of primary importance to the artists and artists’ groups, which were emerging both nationally and internationally, in that it makes its own mediums (paints, canvas) an issue. This “essential painting”⁶ was widespread. It even found its way into the exhibition” A New Spirit in Painting” which introduced younger, more determined, figurative viewpoints in contrast to some old masters (Picasso). But in contrast to “essential” painters such as Gotthard Graubner and Robert Ryman, a new, or rather a newly discovered, generation of painters made it their job to depict what they saw in subjects “outside the picture”. The artist, as a subject, put his name to the work each time with his own particular gestures and style of figures. The central theme was almost inevitably a male body, either whole or as a fragment. In contrast to pure Colorfield Painting, by Ellsworth Kelly for example, this appeared as conservative as it was provocative.

One is reminded of the classical academic definition of painting as formulated by Nicolas Poussin in the 17th century: “Painting is nothing but the imitation of human actions, which are in fact the only actions worth imitating…”⁷ That this definition of the human figure as the carrier of meaning, whose portrayal above all justified painting, was followed – with its own laws and with a different subject canon from baroque history paintings – in the art of the Eighties was by no means unexpected. In the Sixties and particularly in the Seventies there were forerunners who had found and claimed their own style of figurative painting and were thus celebrated as father figures by a younger generation, especially in the Federal Republic of Germany. Among these were Georg Baselitz, A.R. Penck, Jorg Immendorf and Anselm Kiefer, to name but a few.⁸

Art writers like the Italian Achille Bonito Oliva accompanied the development of figurative painting in the second half of the Seventies with appropriate terms such as transavanguardia, transavant-garde. This term indicated that artists and art critics were freed from the shackles of a progressive ideology which stylistically embodied examples of Classical Modernism, which needed alternating avant-gardes as a driving force. Wholly in accordance with a postmodern awareness, art in the era of transavanguardia implied “… a movement in all directions, including that of history.’⁹ Creativity freed from all conceptual calculation was celebrated and explained: “After the self-flagellation of recent years, the artist has rediscovered pleasure in creativity beyond his own particular role, a creativity which is not being forced into novelty.”¹⁰

Heinrich Klotz pointed out on a general level the peculiarly historical starting point of the contemporary rediscovery of figurative painting: “The repositioning of narrative paintings is combined with a representational reconstruction of things out of the non-representational. If modernism has gone to abstraction and away from objects, then postmodernism has gone back to objects from abstraction.”¹¹ Because in the Seventies it was no longer a foregone conclusion that a picture with fully developed figures could be found, this was the first thing to be challenged.

Works which originated at the same time could actually hardly be grouped together stylistically and in terms of content, since every artist developed his picture world and its contents for himself, free from formal obligations: “The idea of art at the end of the Seventies was that of rediscovering pleasure and danger within itself, which involved wandering around and annoying people as the stuff of imagination, but never mixed powerfully with final commitment.”¹² The artists Oliva may have been thinking of when he said this were the Italians Enzo Cucchi, Mimmo Paladino, Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia and Nicola De Maria. The term Arte cifra was coined to characterize their art, which emphasized the mysterious and symbolic sides of poetically situated figuration. Arte povera, particularly the painting of Mario Merz, provided important foundations for this style of Italian art. – Transavanguardia was not attributed just to the Italian artists, as shown by the exhibition “Transavanguardia: Italy-America” in 1982 in Modena (Galleria Civica), in which Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat also participated. The curator was Achille Bonito Oliva.

Wolfgang Becker, who brought together French, American and German artists (including Kiefer, Baselitz, Immendorf, Penck and Lupertz) in an exhibition entitled “The New Fauves” in Aachen in 1979, tried in an equally associative and exaggerated way to distinguish the new and, stylistically speaking, completely disparate painting of the “top-heavy” art of the Seventies: “We can imagine … that the artists who nowadays have stepped into the limelight with large-scale exhibitions, are turning against those who have not lived up to expectations. For they were colorless, cold, unimpressive, calculating, obsessed, passive, emotionless, lacking in history, academic, analytical, unable to communicate and impractical.”¹³

A whole series of West German painters who were not present at the Aachen exhibition combined with the New Fauves or the “Wild” Painting in the years which followed. Of note was the Cologne group of painters of the Mulheimer Freiheit, which included Walter Dahn, Georg Jifi Dokoupil, Peter B6mmels and Hans Peter Adamski. Albert Oehlen and Werner Buttner were working in Hamburg. In Berlin, K. H. Hodicke, Bernd Koberling, Bernd Zimmer, Helmut Middendorf, Salome and Rainer Fetting represented a new “violent painting.”¹⁴ Martin Kippenberger is to be seen as a solitary individual who left behind him the speed painting of many colleagues and their attitudes to the spontaneous and the natural.

In France, Fauve Painting traded under the name Figuration fibre, the term coined by the Fluxus painter Ben Vautier in 1981. But French artists were not granted the privilege of an important international breakthrough into the art market which German and Italian artists such as Penck and Cucchi had experienced.¹⁵ The exhibition “Cinq sur Cinq. Figuration fibre France – USA” gave rise to the assumption that Figuration fibre should be considered to be a style concept of their internationality. The exhibition took place in the Musee de la Ville de Paris in 1985 and compared the work of the five most important French artists of this new taste in art with works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf, the graffiti artist John Matos (Crash), and the photographs of Tseng Kwong Chi.

At the end of the Seventies the pre-pains of a new era of painting were outlined in the USA under the label “New Image Painting.” This expression served as the title of an exhibition of contemporary American painting which was shown in 1978 at the Whitney Museum in New York.¹⁶ Even earlier, the artists of “Pattern and Decoration Painting,” who until then had hardly been heard of outside the USA, had tried their hand at a new pictorial language working with trivial ornament structures and patterns, which are also to be found in the work of Frank Stella at this time.¹⁷ Several of the artists who had exhibited at the Whitney Museum in 1978, such as David Salle and Julian Schnabel, achieved star status. The Neoexpressionist Eric Fischl should also be included here. They all profited from the trend of gestural-expressive painting which had originated in Europe. Looking back, Leo Castelli, the New York gallery owner, recognized this: “Let us recall the Seventies once more. In art these were quite uneventful years. At least in comparison with the boom which we experienced in the Sixties. But in the Seventies we asked: ‘What next?’ Well, what we got at the end of the Seventies was German and Italian Neo-Expressionism. These new young artists burst onto the scene with such force we almost thought that American supremacy was over. We had Schnabel, Salle and Robert Longo all at the same time – America was just about hanging on in there.”¹⁸ An art boom resulted and combined with a cult of the artist in a fashion for figurative and gestural painting, which would have been inconceivable in this form a few years before. It ushered in a golden age for the art market. The art scene gave birth to artist princes: “The Eighties were the decade of pictures; the decade of artists who were even more in the glare of publicity than their pictures, whose message was thus all too easily ignored; the Eighties were the decade in which the ‘life style’ of the younger artists turned into the title history of the magazine.”¹⁹

William N. Copley (b. 1919) and Philip Guston (1913-1980)²⁰, Americans of the older generation, were at that time rediscovered as the forerunners of subjective figurative painting. This led to Copley’s participation in documenta 7 in Kassel (1982), in which David Salle and Jonathan Borofsky (with his Hammering Man) were also represented, as well as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Copley’s picture This Year Give Guilt appeared with others in Kassel. In it Copley described in a laconic and naive tone a moral tale about the sinful relationship between a man and a woman, presumably a prostitute. In front of the altar of a church a priest who is there begs God with a raised right hand for a verdict of guilt for “for this year” for the sinner, who kneels in front of the naked woman. Since the colored glazed church windows show a great deal of female flesh, the setting has a two-fold effect. The church also appears to be a secret temple of pleasure. What reminds us here of Haring, besides the moral tone which in the language of this picture is distinctly less graphic than in Haring’s work, is the creation of figures drawn only in outline. The inner areas produced were in fact colorfully painted, but a further feature is conspicuous by its absence, particularly as far as the faces are concerned. The figures have a model-like quality and an anonymity which they found again in Haring’s work (cf. cat. no. 21).

One feature of painting in the Eighties is the monumental format of many of the pictures. In Keith Haring’s work this resulted in part from his works on internal and external walls in the outside spaces of the city growing to huge dimensions (cf. the mural in San Antonio in Pisa painted in June 1989)²¹ The production of stage sets for The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (cat. no. 12) for Marseille appeared to be just as thorough as the creation of a backdrop for the Palladium discotheque (cat. no. 15) in New York.²² Both European and American painting of the Eighties presented emotional gesture in a large-scale format, which the opulent history paintings by Piloty or Makart equaled in every way. This is so in the works of Anselm Kiefer, Enzo Cucchi, Julian Schnabel and A.R. Penck, which reach a width of more than 10 meters.²³ Andy Warhol’s pictures based on Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper²⁴ in Milan surpassed, like his Retrospective Paintings had done before, large pictures from the category of outsize picture format favored by American post-war artists (Pollock, Newman). In many exhibitions in the Eighties one also sees gigantic colorful picture montages by Gilbert and George based on photographs, which may be explained as striking narrative pictures with moral and social themes, without developing the explicit sharp focus of Keith Haring’s picture narrative (cf. cat. no. 17).

A starting point for emphasizing the uniqueness of Haring’s art, in contrast to the other philosophies of figurative painting, can be found in the style of his figures.

In the European sphere Haring has a stylistically original forerunner in A.R. Penck, where working with symbolically foreshortened figures is concerned, Penck, who was born in Dresden as Ralf Winkler in 1939, received international recognition in the Eighties. He also took part in several exhibitions in New York, where he was shown for the first time at the Ileana Sonnabend Gallery.²⁵ In that year he was represented not just in the “Zeitgeist” exhibition, but also, like Keith Haring, who was 19 years his junior, in the documenta 7 exhibition. The social and political conditions in East Germany, where Penck had lived since 1980, had influenced the themes of the pictures he had painted since the Sixties, in which he developed a polished figurative oeuvre, which he had driven forward in a new direction in the Seventies and Eighties.

The title of his picture The Polish Rider alludes to a work of the same title (c, 1655) in the Frick Collection in New York. This picture, attributed to Rembrandt, shows a solitary horse rider in a landscape, whilst in Penck’s work the figure of the man on horseback is just one of numerous elements in the picture. But it is arranged in a prominent place in the middle within the wide-format picture surface. In the structure of the picture, which is organized as a surface without much spatial depth, are Penck’s well-known Giacometti-like stick men, which he had developed some 20 years before in his “world pictures.” In contrast to Haring’s figures they are assembled angularly from several lines. The American’s figures, however, are developed as outline figures. The smoothly drawn brush strokes surround the inner space like contours, which are only sparsely filled in with further lines. Thus the figures remain committed to the surface almost as ornament, whereas in Penck’s work they detach themselves from the background like silhouettes. Penck’s picture reflects the division into two spheres, which meet in the form of the horse, the theme of the partition of Germany and its splitting-up into different ideological systems. Between the two halves and their figures, which are hierarchically graduated like a chessboard, there are still connections and transitions. The brushwork appears powerful and archaic in comparison with Haring’s characteristic regular, smooth flow. In contrast to Haring’s complex story pictures (cat. no. 10), the range of figures and semantic content appear quite abstract. And because Penck’s pictures revolve less around erotic themes, penises are indicated just by a short stroke of the brush to identify a figure as a man, not as the almost manically stylized “organ of communication” it is in Haring’s work.

Haring was a close friend of Francesco Clemente, who was born in Naples in 1952, and his family. He also valued the Italian highly as a painter: “I have nothing but respect for Francesco Clemente. Like Jean-Michel Basquiat, George Condo and Kenny Scharf he is one of my favorite artists. I like to look at his work, and he inspires me”.²⁶ Clemente made several journeys to India and Afghanistan in the Seventies. From 1978 he had a studio in Madras. His stay there led him to a dialogue with non-European worlds of art and imagination.²⁷ Even when he moved to New York in 1982-83, Madras remained a more important place of residence for the artist. In his drawings and paintings, Clemente dedicated himself to the poetic intensification of human (psychological and emotional) experiences, which he tried to capture with his figurative imagination, which was at first glance hermetically effective: “Clemente’s main theme is the body as a meeting point for the symbolic, the real and the imaginary. He provided a stage from which he imagined the scattering of identity in which he drifted along. (…) His pictures often start where suffering and passion are no longer remote from each other: between the legs of both sexes and each one in the other.”²⁸ A good example of this is the pastel Circuito from 1981, interpreted in a summary by Wilfried Dickhoff as a “non-oedipal circle of a woman giving birth, a desired child and a man/father, who appears to be unable to close the circle … “²⁹ In Clemente’s work communication between the inner and the outer plays a part in his projection of human bodies, which he described in fragmentary or expressive form: “I consider the body to be a place between the inner and the outer world. They meet there, and that is their common space. The skin can also be said to belong to both a room and a body; it is a space which is common to both.”³⁰ The following comment by Clemente is also helpful with regard to Keith Haring’s interconnection of figures in pictures through different variants of sexual intercourse (cf. cat. no. 17), significant both for content and in a formal way: “When the meaning of internal experience is as insistent as the meaning of external experience, then the place where they meet is the opening which separates the inner body from the outer world. Eyes, ears, nose, mouth and sex.”³¹

In the work of Haring and Clemente, emotionally and psychologically extreme experiences (internal experiences) are connected to bodily association with other people and things (external experiences). In the pictures they imagined both forms of experience were there together.

When Clemente says that painting and drawing portray a continuation of the body,”³² it calls to mind examples of painting by the New Fauves which, in comparison with his poetical constructs, is more aggressively and spontaneously expressed. The collaborative work, Gedanken sind Feuer (Thoughts are fire), by Walter Dahn (b. 1954) and Georg Jifi Dokoupil (b. 1954) shows, as does Clemente’s “Arte cifra,” a symbolically constructed “mixed creature” which in outline recalls a brush or a broom. A human head can be made out, from above which stretches up a rectangular field of thoughts, which could also be a sphere of action: in one hand the figure holds a torch and in the other a ladder, ready to destroy or enter the interior of the space (city or wood). The terse formulation is a reminder that Haring likewise invented numerous monstrous figures onto which he grafted enlarged heads such as television screens as surrogate objects for brain or face (cat. no. 6). Thoughts are not only able to cause a (self-destructive) fire and thus exert power in the work of Dahn/Dokoupil. Kenny Scharf, who was born in 1958 in Los Angeles and who was a friend of Keith Haring, played an important role in the Eighties in the club and art scenes in New York’s East Village.³³ He worked as a performance artist. Haring and Scharf, who had become friends at the School of Visual Arts in New York, stood in for each other in many group exhibitions in the early Eighties – frequently in collaboration with spray painters or artists from the environs of the graffiti scene such as Jean-Michel Basquiat.³⁴ It fitted in well with Kenny Scharf’s philosophy of life, for he was very aware of the success, “fun” and mass effectiveness of his art, so much so that he gave this name to the Fun Gallery on the Lower East Side.³⁵

In his painting Scharf devoted himself to his postulated and stylized “pop surrealism,”³⁶ in which comic figures from American animated cartoons (“The Flintstones,” “The Jetsons”) were transformed with amorphous, vegetable elements into new configurations resembling the wealth of surrealist forms of Yves Tanguy. The colors which he used for them were particularly garish and artificial.³⁷ They went further than the bright shades in many of Haring’s works (cat. no. 15): The work Jungle Jism, in which the wealth of plant forms was perhaps influenced by his stay in his Brazilian wife’s native land (Haring visited the Scharfs later in Brazil), proved to be a many-layered all-over structure. In contrast to Haring’s two-dimensional figure formation, which dispensed with the illusion of three-dimensional depth, Scharf brought the prolific plant growth and exotic fantasy animals vividly into the foreground. Behind this foreground layer lies a textured surface of traces of thinner paint drips running vertically down. The pop canon of color and form emphasized the artificial fruitfulness (jism = sperm) of Kenny Scharf’s art, which found satisfaction in its decorative caliber. The shaping of a narrative texture, which in content as well as in Haring’s work referred to a biographical or social reality outside the boundaries of the square of the painting, was missing from Jungle Jism and other works by Kenny Scharf, such as Form and Content from 1983.

Proximity to the New York graffiti scene and their “Pieces” is indicated in the work of Scharf, who was trained in the techniques of American photorealism of the Seventies,³⁸ on the one hand by a three-dimensional style to his shapes, and on the other by the use of spray colors, which was clear in the horizontal calligraphic positioning of strokes in the foreground of Form and Content.

However, in this connection it is wrong to include Scharf or even Keith Haring in the “star spray painters of the gallery scene” in New York.³⁹ Haring in particular refrained most of the time from using the graffiti writers’ obligatory spray can. Nevertheless, the graffiti scene was very important for the artists of the East Village as a background. This is borne out by the exhibition “New York/New Wave” at P.S.1 (February 1981). which brought together the graffiti spray painters (Fab 5 Freddy, Haze, Seen) and artists such as Kenny Scharf, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The osmotic relationship between spray painters and artists, between the underground and galleries- one thinks of Keith Haring’s collaboration with the young spray painter L.A. II (Angel Ortiz) – appears in the title of another New York exhibition which was shown in the Mudd Club in April 1981. The show was called “Beyond Words. Graffiti Based – Rooted – Inspired Works.”⁴⁰

Jean-Michel Basquiat, who was born in Brooklyn in 1960, was one of the most prominent representatives of the New York art world of the Eighties, as was Keith Haring. Close friendship and collaboration with Andy Warhol⁴¹ showed the special position of this black American artist. More works were produced in collaboration with Andy Warhol and Francesco Clemente in 1984 and 1985.⁴² In contrast to Haring and Scharf, who completed their studies at an academic art school before becoming involved with the graffiti scene, Basquiat had actually scrawled graffiti on the walls in a mass of houses in Manhattan under the pseudonym (tag) SAMO, before his meteoric rise as an artist began, which made him one of the youngest participants in the documenta exhibition in Kassel in 1982. He was represented there with Lee Quinones, the leading man in Charlie Ahearn’s film “Wild Style” which appeared in the same year,⁴³ who was also a graffiti spray painter at the time from New York.⁴⁴

Basquiat’s picture 6 Month, produced a year before the artist’s death from a drug overdose, showed the apparently amateurish, naive style of drawing or painting which was typical of him. Fragments of drawing and text occasionally came into the picture, which was filled in with various unrelated pictorial elements. Basquiat did not even attempt, in his work, the fabric of interlinked line and figure pictures which was a typical construction in many of Haring’s works (cat. no. 3), More often he gave the impression, when the picture combined several experiments, that he was portraying individual objects, such as heads. Basquiat interrupted the drawing of a head and started again somewhere else. Earlier versions of the drawing were papered over and painted over. Sometimes paints were used, sometimes a thinner felt tip pen. A black figure with a brown head, possibly a self-portrait of the artist, stands in the right-hand half of the picture between the graphic experiments. All around are the assembled elements of the picture in a more loosely packed order, The canvas resembles a white plastered wall which, over the course of time, has been covered with various deliberately inartistic graffiti, They bring to mind children’s drawings or Dubuffet’s paintings.

Primitivism, which the observer of the work might interpret in the technical as well as the stylistic sense, is well thought out: Basquiat paints like a black artist who is presenting himself to the white art public unencumbered with the painting style of a “primitive” black artist. The naivety and naturalness of the painting are a refined construct, and are therefore just faked.⁴⁵ Nevertheless, they inevitably cast their spell over the observer. The “simplicity” of Haring’s works, however, is not achieved by simulating a “primitive” style, but by restricting himself to what appear to be perhaps archaic figures which he nonetheless fitted together in his pictures in a complex system (cat. no. 36).

Although that is the end of a brief tour d’horizon of the painting of the Eighties, designed to locate Haring’s art, which present-day observers perceive as original and varied, that phenomenon of artistic primitivism already observed in Basquiat’s work should in conclusion be briefly addressed. When he painted a glass wall in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne (1984), Keith Haring experienced an unexpected interpretation of his art: “When the wall painting was finished, an article appeared on the front page of the Melbourne Press which proclaimed that it was an insult that I – an American artist – had been invited to Australia to paint aboriginal art here. I did not even know what aboriginal art was! But the Australians felt very offended, they interpreted it as an attack on their artistic heritage. This matter made them really paranoid.Now, what I had painted for them on the glass wall was not in the least bit different from what I had painted all over the world. I think that pictorial elements are made up of all the concentric circles and curving lines and small figures and patterns possible. It was news to me that they were so similar to the art of the Australian Aborigines.”⁴⁶

If the presumed similarity of Haring’s stylistic medium and the art of the Australian Aborigines appears to be accidental in this case, then one can accept the conscious adoption of pre-Columbian or African artifacts (in the form of their reproduction) in other cases.⁴⁷ The symmetrical arrangement in the composition of individual works by Haring (cat. no. 13) points to a vertical central axis and, in their wealth of forms, to a clear affinity with Aztec art such as the portrait of Quetzalcoatl on a Toltec commemorative plaque. But efforts to create concrete models of individual figures can soon lead ad absurdum when one remembers that, according to Maarten van de Guchte, Haring possessed a “voracious appetite for images.” “That hunger was coupled with a supreme facility for aesthetic digestion.”⁴⁸ Thus the artist was able to digest this visually incorporated pictorial material in a suitably artistic way. He himself emphasized his interest in both works of art and ethnological artifacts: “My eye and my hand have been trained by these other things, both from modern art and from primitive works of art. Both of them are equally available and have probably gone into my consciousness in equal amounts.”⁴⁹

Haring linked the adoption of “primitive” works of art with criticism of putting them in museums, which he saw as destroying their original creative impulse. Expressions of disapproval with regard to the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing (Metropolitan Museum, New York), which was opened in 1982, and in which the “Arts of the Americas, Oceania and Africa” were displayed, point in this direction.⁵⁰ In his opinion the works should react to life, then harness their strength and content, which they had taken from reality, for the benefit of mankind. This was the general idea behind an ideal “pop culture”, as he remarked elsewhere: “I think if people make art that is in tune with popular culture and comes from popular culture, they should put it back into that culture.”⁵¹ By comparison with the artists previously mentioned, Keith Haring’s great strength lay in his stylistically varied adaptation of figurative painting in this return to popular culture, which did not have to sacrifice serious issues.

Footnotes