RADIANT

The life and legacy of an instantly recognizable artist.

Biographer, novelist, and memoirist Gooch draws on archival sources to chronicle the energetic life of Keith Haring (1958-1990), who “occupied a space both in high fine art culture and low demotic street art.” The son of an amateur cartoonist, as a child Haring was obsessed with Dr. Seuss and Disney. “His number one obsession through all his school years,” Gooch writes, “remained the magic box of television,” which transported him outside of Kutztown, Pennsylvania, where he grew up. The author traces Haring’s exposure to art at several art schools, notably New York’s School of Visual Arts, where he enrolled in the fall of 1978. There, Gooch reveals, he “quickly adopted and adapted the various innovative movements and styles” to which he was being exposed. As Haring searched for his identity as an artist, he also came to terms with his sexuality. At camp, when he was a young teenager, he’d felt his first attraction to a boy. By the time he came to New York, he methodically “made coming out into a project, an item on a to-do list.” Haring is the central figure in Gooch’s lively portrayal of a roiling art world and of gay culture in the 1980s. By 1981, Haring was sought after by collectors, but he became frustrated “at the disconnect between his popular success and his lagging acceptance by the art establishment.” Nevertheless, among the glitterati populating “the moveable scene” he created around himself were Madonna, Sean Lennon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Yoko Ono, and Andy Warhol. Gooch’s Haring was a romantic, “boyish, sweet, innocent” and “not quite grown-up.” His logo was the image of a baby, “the purest and most positive experience of human existence,” wrote Haring. “Children are the bearers of life in its simplest and most joyous form.”

A sympathetic and well-researched portrait.