Drawing from the outside in: 'Keith Haring: 1978-1982' at the Brooklyn Museum of Art:
A Keith Haring exhibition, now on at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, displays the intricate art of a youthful yet assured artist
Bio: Will Heinrich spent his early childhood in Japan and grew up in New York. His novel The King's Evil was published in 2003 and won a PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship in 2004. He writes about art for The New York Observer.
A small but densely packed show, Keith Haring on view now at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, consists of notebook, full-size, and enormous drawings, undergraduate video art, New York Post headline collages, subway chalk drawings, Polaroids, and other kinds of pictures, including one incredible forty-nine-foot-long mural, dating from the artist’s arrival in New York and enrollment at the School of Visual Arts. It gives a clear, exciting picture of a young artist with a distinct and singular talent. While it was flexible enough to be experimented with, and did require some small amount of development and elaboration, this talent essentially emerged—to borrow a phrase from the Devo song “Shrivel Up”—a “God-given fact.” More
Posted on March 16th, 2012 4:02pm
The choice of the unadorned title Cindy Sherman for the artist's new MoMA retrospective (on view starting Sunday) is particularly apt. Sherman is, after all, a pioneer of postmodern misdirection whose favorite subject has always been Cindy Sherman. But that’s all you get—no subtitle. More
Posted on February 24th, 2012 9:47am
The still photos that follow were mostly taken by members of New York’s Photo League, founded in 1936 as a splinter of an offshoot of the leftist Workers International Relief and disbanded, by proximate force of blacklist, in 1951. Depression and life-destroying paranoia were the context in which the League worked, and again, seven decades later, form the context in which we’re viewing the photos. In both cases the question is how to balance the demands of justice against the demands of art. More
Posted on January 4th, 2012 10:42am
